Wonder When you'll Miss me- By Amanda Davis
It was like I'd left behind something at Berrybrook besides the forty-eight pounds and seven months. Some invisable part of my brain forgotten on a shelf somewhere, some key ingredient to navigating the world abandoned in that stupid Tudor buliding on that stupid green hill. I didn't even know how to look for what was gone, how to recognize it if I found it. How to ask for help.
But I didn't want to be better than anyone. I just wanted to be me. And, yes, I wanted to show up, to be noticed. But inside some of me still wanted desperately to disappear. Of course that's what had gotten me to Beryybrook in the first place: trying to disappear.
Then each morning I woke up to the blinding Berrybrook sunlight and thought I was a little girl in my bed at home again, that my father would come and wake me at any minute. And then, slowly, I blinked awake to the ceiling tiles and the scrffed wood floor, the chrome-rimmerd bed and the hum of the room, and relized that I'd grown up.
But it was just one more thing. One more way the days would form and even at the bottom of everything I was, I just didn't care that much right then. It was all about one more day and just for now and every other cliche in the world. It was all about waking and eating and running and sleeping. And it was about getting through to the next day, all of it even, nobody hurt. Me alive, though I still wasn't sure i wanted to be.
"Careful." She gave a snort. "Jesus. You're so careful that you're a danger to yourself..."

When he says, "I love you, honey," you realize that he never calls you by your name. You will say good-bye for all the right reasons. You're tired of living in wait for his apocalypse. You have your own fight on your hands, and though it's no bigger or more noble than his, it will rewuire all of your energy. It's you who has to hold on to the earth. You have to tighten your grip- which means letting go of him.

-The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank

Before dinner, my grandmother read the newspaper, tsk-tsking and complaining to no one in particular that the world was going to hell. Everything was wrong; nothing was the way it used to be."What do you think was so good about the good old days?" I asked in exasperation. But I heard how harsh my voice was and didn't like it. I said, "What do you miss, I mean?"While she thought, I waite to make my point: that everything was much better now than it used to be; I'd cite the civil rights and women's movements."The boy who lit the street lamps in the evening," she said, finally. "HE carried a stool with him."I understood then-- it was like missing Nantucket-- and I put my hand on top of hers. It occure dto me that everything was more complicated than I thought. - The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank

"To die, to sleep - to sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause; there's the respect that makes calamity of so long life"
-- 'Hamlet' Shakespeare

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.--Alice Walker, The Color Purple

"There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."-Nicholas Sparks, "The Notebook"

"I'd begun to realise that there was an unspoken prejudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses, can correct it. The scholars and intellectuals I met at our dinner-table always seemed to hold a grudge against the world. They could never quite reconcile themselves that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage. And that, they seemed to think, was a shame."
- The Rule of Four, Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

"Yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

~Oscar Wilde,The Picture of Dorian Gray

And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far-off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
-James Baldin, Giovanni's Room

"We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us."

Blood Orchid by Charles Bowden

Quote from Sexus by Henry Miller
"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes deperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there."

"You know the feeling of recognition you get when you look in a mirror? 'That's me,' you think to yourself, 'My hair needs to be combed and, hey, there's a pimple on my nose!' Well I got that same feeling no matter where I looked. I looked at the asphalt road and it was my face. I looked at the bridge and the bridge was me staring back at myself. It was a physical sensation, as if the sky had my eyes and could see me staring up at it. There was no doubt that this state was 'true.' It was far more true than the state I had considered to be normal up until then. I had no need to confirm it with anyone.
It's all me."-Brad Warner, Hardcore Zen

"...There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics."

"And that covers everybody?"

"Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types."

Foucault's Pendulum
Umberto Eco

STANLEY: Your looks are okay.
STELLA: I was fishing for a compliment, Stanley.
STANLEY: I don't go in for that stuff.
STELLA: What--stuff?
STANLEY: Compliments to women about their looks. I never met a woman that didn't know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they've got. I once went out with a doll who said to me, "I am the glamorous type, I am the glamorous type!" I said, "So what?"

-A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

..And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual.
--John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?"

-The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

“Love, desire, and need get all confused and they fight and switch clothes just to fuck with me. But all three burn and ache and when mixed are this dangerous chemical compound that releases poisonous gases from my eyes, clouds of readable smoke, inscribed with all my naked wishes and poetry. And these are the times I want to close my eyes to the world, and these are the times that they are so wide open I scarcely take the time to blink, usually racing from one club, one bed, to another. Love is what makes me keep writing and trying and doing it over and over until I get it right.”
-Thea Hillman, from Depending on the Light

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
-Anais Nin, Oct. 27, 19333, from Incest

"Everyone has a moment in his history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person 'the world today' or 'life' or 'reality' he will assume you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever."-John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn’t want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctor’s office, or coming back from someplace you didn’t enjoy going to, or waiting for a bus-- all the little useless spaces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. Nobody seemed surprised when I told them I’d learned how; Mother just nodded and
smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be careful not to lose any; fold it flat.”


John Crowley
Little, Big