excerpts

the sound and the fury, 3

2007-10-22T17:48:00.000-05:00

you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead and i temporary and he you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this now were getting at it you seem to regard it merely as an experience that will whiten your hair overnight so to speak without altering your appearance at all you wont do it under these conditions it will be a gamble and the strange thing is that man who is conceived by accident and whose very breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him will not face that final main which he knows before hand he has assuredly to face without essaying expedients ranging all the way from violence to petty chicanery that would not deceive a child someday in very disgust he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card no man ever does that under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realised that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman

- William Faulkner

the sound and the fury, 2

2007-09-27T08:17:00.000-05:00

she couldn't see that Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not.

- William Faulkner

love scenes

2007-09-12T10:41:00.000-05:00

I loved the love scene. It's very good. - Laurel

Well, that's because they're not always telling each other how much in love they are. A good love scene should be about something besides love. For instance, this one, me fixing grapefruit; you sitting over there dopey, half-asleep. Anyone looking at us could tell we were in love. - Dixon

from the film, In a Lonely Place

How would I die when I'm 35?

2007-09-10T16:49:00.000-05:00

How would I die when I'm 35? How would I die? I'll tell ya how I'd die. I'd take off all my clothes and I'd get into a bathtub filled with ice cold vodka and I'd have a TV in the room with me and I'd be watching North by Northwest and just when the scene comes with the airplane, I'd pull the TV in the bathtub and shock myself. I hate that film.

- Paul in the movie Arizona Dream

the sound and the fury, 1

2007-09-02T17:34:00.000-05:00

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

- William Faulkner

life

2007-09-01T08:17:00.000-05:00

"Life consists of what a person is thinking all day long."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

money

2007-08-31T22:06:00.000-05:00

"What good is money if it can't inspire terror in your fellow man?"

- Mr. Burns

mental selves

2007-08-29T16:50:00.000-05:00

Society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves. I imagine your mind, and especially what your mind thinks about my mind, and what your mind thinks about what my mind thinks about your mind. I dress my mind before yours and expect that you will dress yours before mine. Whoever cannot or will not perform these feats is not properly in the game.

-Charles Horton Cooley, 1927

hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world

2007-08-29T07:31:00.000-05:00

The sofa was perfect for sleeping. Not too soft, not too hard; even the cushions pillowed my head just right. Doing different tabulation jobs, i've slept on a lot of sofas, and let me tell you, the comfortable ones are few and far between. Typically, they're cheap deadweight. Even the most luxurious-looking sofas are a disappointment when you actually try to sleep on them. I never understand how people can be lax about choosing sofas.

I always say--a prejudice on my part, i'm sure--you can tell a lot about a person's character from his choice of sofa.... Procuring a good sofa ... requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior sofa. That sofa among sofas.

-Haruki Murakami

dialogue with the mirror

2007-08-28T21:50:00.000-05:00

He was surprised at his own behavior, standing in front of a mirror and making faces like an idiot. Nevertheless, he thought that everybody behaved the same way in front of a mirror and his indignation was greater then with the certainty that since the world was idiotic, he was only rendering tribute to vulgarity.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez