𝔦. ——— true detective season one

• "if the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward then, brother, that person is a piece of shit" — rustin cohle
• "this is what i mean when i'm talking about time, and death, and futility. there are broader ideas at work. mainly, what is owed between us, as a society, for our mutual illusions. fourteen straight hours of staring at dbs, these are the things you think of. you ever done that? you look in their eyes, even in a picture. doesn't matter if they're dead or alive, you can still read them. and you know what you see? they welcomed it. hm. not at first, but right there in the last instant, it's an unmistakable relief. see, cause they were afraid and now they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just let go. and they saw... in that last nanosecond, they saw what they were. that you, yourself, this whole, big drama, it was never anything but a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will. and you could just let go. finally know that you didn't have to hold on so tight. to realize that, in your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory; all your pain, it was all the same thing. it was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room. a dream about being a person. and like a lot of dreams, there's a monster at the end of it." — rustin cohle
• ✮ "the ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that's what the preacher sells. same as a shrink. see, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. then he tells you it's a fucking virtue. always a buck to be had doing that. and it's such a desperate sense of entitlement, isn't it? "surely this is all for me. me. me, me... i... i'm so fucking important. right?" (dramatic noises) fuck you." — rustin cohle

𝔦𝔦. — sabahattin ali, madonna in a fur coat

• "my greatest pleasure was to sit alone beside the river, or in the far corner of the garden, and let my thoughts waft away. my daydreams were in sharp contrast to real life; they were full of adventures and heroic deeds. like the heroes in the countless novels I had read in translation, I was possessed of a sweet and mysterious desire."
• "but life was meant to be lived, as these people were doing. they were taking their share of life, and giving something back. what was I in comparison? what did my soul ever do, apart from gnawing away at me like a woodworm? this gramophone, this wooden inn, this ice-covered lake, these snow-covered trees and this jumbled crowd: they were all busy with the tasks that life had given them. there was meaning in everything they did, even if I could not see at first glance. and I was but the wheel that had spun off its axle, still searching for reasons as I wobbled off into the void. no doubt I was the most useless man in the world. the world would be no worse off without me. i expected nothing of anyone and no one expected anything of me."

𝔦𝔦𝔦. — simone st. james, the sun down motel

• "the rest of us are stuck in time. you know—you do one thing in the morning, this other thing in the afternoon, go to sleep at night. the same thing every day. but that isn’t real, is it? it’s just something we construct for ourselves. if we wanted to, we could let it go."

𝔦𝔳. — alexandre dumas, the man in the iron mask

• "... and the clinking of the keys hanging from the jailer's girdle made itself heard up to the stories of the towers, as if to remind the prisoners that the liberty of earth was a luxury beyond their reach."

𝔳. — penpal, dathan auerbach

• "she couldn’t have been more than six, and when her father picked her up so that she could see through the glass, her face lit up as her eyes moved over all the different kinds of ice cream that were on display. when her dad asked her which flavor she wanted, she must have ignored the fact that he was not speaking about a plurality of scoops, and she excitedly named some and pointed to others. gradually, the realization began to set in that she could only choose one kind of ice cream, and as i watched her try to pick just one flavor, i could see how anxious she was becoming. it wasn’t greed that beset her; it was the result of wanting many things equally but not having the emotional resources to settle arbitrarily on just one."