quote blog

CLAY
Love is a very beautiful, very intense feeling for a startling short period of time. Before long, you realize it gets in the way of the important things in life; like, just going to sleep or being left alone. That's when love starts fading and lies kick in.

—Moral Orel, S02E02

Keeping busy and my mind off being alone
But it seems that’s all I ever really want these days.

—My Black Dog/Cosmic Being, Glocca Morra

Muggers, drunks, dopers and pimps—an uneventful night, until now... Until she enters it. Catwoman—a living shade of raw, sleek darkness... Brazenly furtive... Vividly tantalizing. She moves in grace through mystery. Close enough to glimpse, too distant to reach. And then she’s gone... Leaving me fascinated... But somehow doubting the magnified evidence of my own eye. Was she ever really there? And if so, why was she there? Why was she running free? Why has the former Batman never taken her down for good? Was Bruce Wayne also fascinated by her grace and mystery? Was he ever close enough to reach her? To touch her? If so, was the touch rough? Or tender? Almost dawn. Maybe I’ll dream about her... A cat-burglar slipping and gliding through the night, her body cutting the darkness in whispers. A thief who takes more than the bright glitter of diamonds and pearls. A woman, a shadow, who can steal a man’s eye and his imagination... Maybe even his heart. If it’s dark enough.

—Doug Moench, Batman #503

The Internet is not a public sphere. The Internet is a private sphere that tolerates public speech.

—Clay Shirky

Learning is an experience. Everything else is just information.

—Unknown

The motion picture medium has an extroardinary range of expression. It has in common with the plastic arts the fact that it is a visual composition projected onto a two-dimensional surface; with dance, that it can deal in the arrangement of movement; with theatre, that it can create a dramatic intensity of events; with music, that it can compose in the rhythms and phrases of time and can be attended by song and instrument; with poetry, that it can juxtapose images; with literature generally, that it can encompass in its soundtrack the abstractions available only to language.

—Maya Deren

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

—Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

You hate the idea
That you’re wasting your youth
But you stood in the background
Waiting until you got older.

—Tonite, LCD Soundsystem

I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late.

—Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

—The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think that for me, success is getting as close to expressing yourself in a true way, with as few filters or things that tear that down, as possible.

—Andrew VanWyngarden

In Aristophanes’s speech where he discusses the origin of love, he says that there were three types of people — round cylindrical beings with two sets of faces, arms, legs — male-male, female-female, and male-female. Together, they were one entity and their power came from their togetherness. When they began to challenge Zeus and the rest of the gods on Mount Olympus, he split them asunder into two parts. That is where love comes from, because we’re forever looking for our other half to make us whole again.

—Symposium, Plato

[My favourite scent is] when you're in love with someone, and the smell is incredible [because it] brings out an animal side of being human.

—Robert Pattison

FRANCES
It’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it… but it’s a party… and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining… and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes… but – but not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual… but because… that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we don’t have the ability to perceive them. That’s – That’s what I want out of a relationship.

—Frances Ha (2012)

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

—The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

—The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity, just like she was above him, and sex, and everything else that's weak and of the flesh.

—One Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey

Probably when I'm 22,
then I'll be doing something new
because I lose attention fast
and I get bored right off the bat
but I hate class, and I hate work
and doing nothing's even worse
but I still curse and complain anyway.

—Impostor Syndrome, Sidney Gish

Pretty much anything you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and power, then you will never have enough; you will never feel that you have enough. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they plant you. Of course we all know this already [...] the trick is keeping the whole truth upfront in daily consciousness. Worship your intellect, you will end up feeling stupid; a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

—This is Water, David Foster Wallace

The thing you must understand about the French is that they understand cool from a very young age. It is juvenile to be cool and wry and aloof. It takes a brave man to show visible ADHD.

—Someone on Twitter, no source

MR UBERWITZ
I would really love to see your vision!

HUEY
Vision? What do you know about my vision? My vision would turn your world upside-down, tear asunder your illusions, and send the sanctuary of your own ignorance crashing down around you.
Now ask yourself; are you really ready to see that vision?

—The Boondocks, S01E08

I've never done bad things,
I've never done good things,
I've never done anything out of the blue.

—Ashes to Ashes, David Bowie