- We're all of us haunted and haunting.
- The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.
- No one wants to admit we're addicted to music. That's just not possible. No one's addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can't bear to be without it, but no, nobody's addicted.
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- The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.
- The shortcut to closing a door is to bury yourself in the details.
- This is how we must look to God.
- As if everything's just fine.
- In journalism school, what they want you to be is a camera. A trained, objective, detached professional. Accurate, polished and observant.
- All we know is, we don't know.
- Some people still think knowledge is power.
- Being a journalist is about telling. It's about bearing the bad news. Spreading the contagion. The biggest story in history. This could be the end of mass media.
- Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too.
- "Don't you feel, somehow, buried in history?"
- "Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a hundred years from now?"
- "People die," she says. "People tear down houses. But furniture, fine, beautiful furniture, it just goes on and on, surviving everything."
- "And what if you can't forget it?" she says. "what if it stays in your head, repeating itself like one of those silly advertising songs? What if it's always there, like a loaded gun waiting for someone to annoy you?"
- Sticks and stones may break your bones, but watch out for those damn words.
- Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
- In a world where vows are worthless. Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.
- Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can hurt like hell.
- Magic is the tuning of needed energy for natural change.
- The ultimate product of death is invoking rebirth.
- "Until you deal with your real personal issues, you'll never be able to control yourself."
- The voice says, maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do. The things you don't finish.
- There are worse things you can do to people you love than kill them.
- Really, this whole world is nothing but assholes.
- "Every generation wants to be the last."
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- We're killing people to save lives?
- We're burning books to save books?
- "I just love everything the same. Plants, animals, humans. I just don't believe the big lie about how we can continue to be fruitful and multiply without destroying ourselves."
- Books can be so evil.
- The smoke from the diesel generators, the screams and rock music and colored lights, do their best to fill the silence. The stars in the night sky don't say a word.
- The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate. Let Big Brother do the singing and dancing for you. Be a reporter. Be a good witness. A grateful member of the audience.
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- I don't know the difference between what I want and what I'm trained to want.
- I can't tell what I really want and what I've been tricked into wanting.
- What I'm talking about is free will. Do we have it, or does God dictate and script everything we do and say and want? Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we're born? Do I have it, or is my mind under the control of Helen's spell?
- Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value. Imagine travelling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melodramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away
- I don't know what I know. I don't know what's true. I doubt I really know anything.
- Power, money, food, sex, love. Can we ever get enough, or will getting some make us crave even more?
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- Do I really want a big house, a fast car, a thousand beautiful sex partners? Do I really want these things? Or am I trained to want them?
- Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now? Am I just under a spell that says nothing is ever good enough?
- Spells to fix spells to fix spells to fix spells, and life just gets more miserable in ways we never imagined. That's the future I see in the mirror
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- I need to rebel against myself
- It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear.
- Imperfect and messy, this is the world I live in. This far from God, these are the people I'm left with. Everybody grabbing for power. Mona and Helen and Nash and Oyster. The only people who know me hate me. We all hate each other. We all fear each other. The whole world is my enemy.
- Everywhere, words are mixing. Words and lyrics and dialogue are mixing in a soup that could trigger a chain reaction. Maybe acts of God are just the right combination of media junk thrown out into the air. The wrong words collide and call up an earthquake. The way rain dances called storms, the right combination of words might call down tornadoes. Too many advertising jingles commingling could be behind global warming. Too many television reruns bouncing around might cause hurricanes. Cancer. AIDS.
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- We’re living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed. We’re left with this cluttered world of language.
- Big Brother singing and dancing and we’re left to watch. Sticks and stones may break your bones but our role is just to be a good audience. To just pay our attention and wait for the next disaster.
- Something foreign is always living itself through you. Your whole life is the vehicle for something to come to earth.
sep 1 2013 ∞
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