why can't we all be so?

"I have nothing to declare except my genius." Oscar Wilde, upon arriving at US customs 1882.

Who was your first favorite super-hero?
It has to be Batman. I remember in about 1965 my dad mentioning Batman, and I asked him what that was, and he said it was a man who dressed up like a bat to fight crime. And I didn't know there was an animal called a bat so I associated it with a cricket bat, and I thought it was a man who literally dressed up like a cricket bat. It was really peculiar but intriguing. And then the TV show started and I watched it and I was really puzzled because he didn't look like any cricket bat I had ever seen.

"You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere." -Uncle Screwtape on the nature of men in The Screwtape Letters

"I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents."
-Steinbeck

"I ain't never really had much fun. I particularly dislike preordained happy occasions. I don't mind Christmas so much, because everyone's involved, as long as they're Christians or lazy atheists, or Muslim but into tinsel. But I've never had a good New Year's Eve, and I don't like birthdays, or any other time when you're meant to be happy. I'm against the prescription of, say, 'Ooh, it's Christmas o'clock. Smile everyone!' For me happiness occurs arbitrarily: a moment of eye contact on a bus, where all at once you fall in love; or a frozen second in a park where it's enough that there are trees in the world."
-Russell Brand

he would know.

"A psychotic thinks that two and two is five. He's very candid. A neurotic knows that two and two is four, but HE CAN'T STAND IT."

-Danny Kaye

it's raining buckets tonight. i can hear it, and it's so wonderful and cold.

"Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates." – Mark Twain

one of my most favorite quotes from a play.

Felix: I can't stand it, Oscar. I hate me, oh boy, do I hate me.

Oscar: You don't hate you, you love you! You think no one has problems like you.

Felix: Don't give me that analyst jazz. I happen to know I hate my guts.

Oscar: Come on, Felix. I've never SEEN someone so in love.

Felix: I thought you were my friend.

Oscar: That's why I can talk to you like this. Because I love you almost as much as YOU do...

i like quotes.

I simply cannot pick favorite quotes, I have too many, I love too much literature and too many films and too many fascinating famous people to pick. However, these two have proven to be enduring and I feel that once I included the second to my collection it was almost like the yin to the yang of the first one, my favorite depression quote since 2005. They both sum up nicely how I feel about life and how to handle it. One is informing us we have a problem, and the other reminds us of a solution. Both make so much sense to me, both are so deeply felt.

"There is no way, I realize, to ever make her understand that homesickness is just a state of mind for me, that I'm always missing some one or some place or something, I'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing."- Elizabeth Wurtzel

"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other" - Mother Teresa

As said by Colin Farrell

"I think I was 8 or 9 when I had a f*cking mad thing for Marilyn Monroe. I used to leave Smarties, the Irish equivalent of M&M's, under my pillow with a little note saying, 'I know you're dead, but these are very f*cking tasty, and you should come have a few. I won't tell anyone'."

So I'm not a huge Colin Farrell fan, though after my intense appreciation for In Bruges built itself up I had a new respect for him and today decided to peruse his weird history on IMDB. I have no idea where the above quote came from but I am definitely seized with love for his Irish weirdness. Very f*cking tasty indeed, dead Marilyn Monroe. Hahahaha.

I dreamed this dream and I still dream of it
and I will dream of it sometime again.
Everything repeats itself and everything will be reincarnated,
and my dreams will be your dreams.
- Tarkovsky

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

"I'm beginning to feel that no author has the right to tear his characters apart if he doesn't know how, or feel that he knows how (poor sucker) to put them together again. I'm tired - my God, so tired - of leaving them all broken on the page with just 'The End' written underneath."

JD Salinger, 1943

JD Salinger, author of works that have meant much, maybe the most to me, and is without a doubt my greatest prose-writing influence (that is to say, inspiration, whatever, as i don't mean to sound like i'm following his tradition or plan to be his successor or anything), died today at age 91. I've said a few times that I'm rather impatient for his passing as it may make available all of his manuscripts written after his withdraw and seclusion from real life, but I never meant it, and I still don't expect that possibility to come together. the truth is, apparently, i found it very comforting to think that hidden away somewhere was this very brilliant, very weird, probably perpetually Holden-esque character (who perhaps liked and likened himself to young people a bit too much), still alive, still at his typewriter, this last living connection to the Glass family, this last family member. There was the thought, however abstract, that, as Holden with Fitzgerald, I might just call him up one day and have a chat, ask after Zooey (and whether the boy is too old now to consider marrying me), and Franny, and if he ever figured out where the ducks go in winter. But I guess I can't really do that now.


What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

How sad, we have lost the last "classic" writer, I may be mistaken but I can think of none other, who has had the effect on literary America that lives. And how sad, I have lost the writer of my favorite story ever put to paper. I feel like I have lost a family, the Glass family, they have moved away, and that though they've left behind their memoirs and photo albums I will miss their presence.

How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person on the other end shouts back 'What?'

To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I'll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record, it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere.

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen.

-Conan O'Brien

A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Stephen Crane

i like this guy. we might be friends.

"question and answer"

he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
of all the letters he had received
telling him that
the way he lived and wrote about
that--
it had kept them going when
all seemed
truly
hopeless.

putting the blade on the table, he
flicked it with a finger
and it whirled
in a flashing circle
under the light.

who the hell is going to save
me? he
thought.

as the knife stopped spinning
the answer came:
you're going to have to
save yourself.

still smiling,
a: he lit a
cigarette
b: he poured
another
drink
c: gave the blade
another
spin.

--from The Last Night of the Earth Poems

bored to death

"Hit me! Get angry!"

"I'm not good with anger, I go straight to depression."

heh.

“ Love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art. ”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

the only good line from "the last kiss", an otherwise horrendous movie.

"Stop talking about love. Every asshole in the world says he loves somebody. It means nothing. It still doesn't mean anything. What you feel only matters to you. It's what you do to the people you say you love, that's what matters. It's the only thing that counts."

said of a prison inmate; a serial killer

"He was buried in a prison cemetery, as no one claimed his body."

Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat

"It's just about a hat, man." - Bob Dylan.