- I think it's important to have clearly defined goals in life, don't you? Especially if you don't have a lot of life left. Because if you don't have clear goals, you might run out of time, and when the day comes, you'll find yourself standing on the parapet of a tall building, or sitting on your bed with a bottle of pills in your hand, thinking, Shit! I blew it. If only I'd set clearer goals for myself.
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- Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader's eye.
- Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.
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- And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?
- And if time is lost forever, what does that mean? It's not like you get to die any sooner, right? I mean, if you want to die sooner, you have to take matters into your own hands.
- It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit. And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they're all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart.
- The way you write ronin is 浪人 with the character for wave and the character for person, which is pretty much how I feel, like a little wave person, floating around on the stormy sea of life.
- The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn't now, then where did it go?
- If you've ever tried to keep a diary, then you'll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you're always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what's happening now, which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction. It's hopeless, really.
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- But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.
- Then is the opposite of now. So saying now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't. It's like the word is committing suicide or something. So then I'd start making it shorter... now, ow, oh, o ...until it was just a bunch of little grunting sounds and not even a word at all. It was hopeless, like trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing, too.
- What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing.
- There's nothing sadder than cyberspace when you're floating around out there, all alone, talking to yourself.
- Do all kids have to worry about their parents' mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times it's the other way around.
- "I can't take a break," she said, sitting back down and crossing her legs. "My whole life is a break. I really need to do this."
- Finally I achieved my goal and resolved my childhood obsession with now because that's what a drum does. When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.
- Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories.
- She chuckled to herself and wiped her eyes with her crooked old finger. Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.
- Fiction had its own time and logic. That was its power.
- "I've always thought of writing as the opposite of suicide," she said. "That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it."
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- "Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes."
- "Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing, not a bad thing."
- What does separation look like? A wall? A wave? A body of water? A ripple of light or a shimmer of subatomic particles, parting? What does it feel like to push through?
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- Sometimes the mind arrives but the words don't.
- Sometimes words arrive but the mind doesn't.
- Sometimes mind and words both arrive.
- Sometimes neither mind nor words arrive.
- Mind and words are time being.
- Arriving and not-arriving are time being.
aug 18 2014 ∞
aug 30 2014 +
aug 30 2014 +