"The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name."Fugitive ( Read more... )

"Leonard asks me if there's anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what's the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that's an easy one, my son, it's whatever you want it to be."

[My Friend Leonard, James Frey]

“What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, ( Read more... )

“I find this kind of living in the past useless and unproductive. I always have. When I started burning old photographs and old letters in Melbourne, before we left for Europe, June cried. It’s something that I have always been obsessed with, throwing things away, traveling with as little baggage as possible, especially when I was young. I used ( Read more... )

“Strange, Patrick thought. He, Patrick Mulvaney, was this young woman’s brother: they’d been brother-and-sister through all of their conscious lives: each was more closely related to the other genetically than either was to either of their parents. Yet he believed he scarcely knew Marianne at all. He loved her, but scarcely knew her. Members of ( Read more... )

"Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again that tear you apart."

["We Were the Mulvaneys", Joyce Carol Oates]

“How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding - escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the Pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience - maybe those people, people who won’t talk to ( Read more... )

“Trust me. That’s what maps are saying. Trust me. Never mind that early metal globes were cut in half and used for pots by hungry sailors. Never mind that all forests and mountains on maps throw their shadows to the east, because draughtsmen usually work with the light on their left, which means that on a map it is always a sunny afternoon. ( Read more... )

“What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts and virtuous acts.

What precipitates acts? Belief.

Belief is both prize and battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & ( Read more... )

The art of losing isn't hard to master ( Read more... )