Something about this instance
Something about this minute
Striving for the future
But don't realise that we're in it
A moment just to float
To ponder and to dote
To dry and to soak
And to take a little toke of that
Nothing
Oh sweet nothing
- Nothing (The Cat Empire)
"Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be."
Shel Silverstein
We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens
— Chuck Palahniuk
"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
“‘I probably still haven’t completely adapted to the world,’ I said after giving it some thought. ‘I don’t know, I feel like this isn’t the real world. The people, the scene: they just don’t seem real to me.’”
Norwegian Wood by Murakami Haruki
“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us the impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly, we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Being crazy is bad. It’s scary when the world isn’t real to you. you come untethered. everything seems imaginary. you look around the room and nothing seems real. you don’t feel pain. I stopped letting myself feel.
Adam Duritz of Counting Crows
She always had that about her, that look of otherness, of eyes that see things much too far, and of thoughts that wander off the edge of the world.
The Girl With No Shadow by Joanne Harris
"Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist - a master - and that is what Auguste Rodin was - can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is… and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be… and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply imprisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart… no matter what the merciless hours have done to her."
Robert A. Heinlein
And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.
— Douglas Coupland, Life After God
