Claire > Claire's Quotes

“That’s when you rise, finally. You rise out of the mud, in the rain, and you go back inside and suddenly everything gets really cold and calm. The answer doesn’t lie in your backyard because no one is going to come and save you even if you beg them to. Especially if you beg them to. You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore.
You have to hang on. You’re almost there. You can make it to the end.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“He had been standing there recognizing that there was a draft in the loft. He had been standing there without realizing that it wasn't a draft. Someone was breathing, behind him. Someone was breathing on his neck. The knowledge froze him, froze the cry of "Jesus fuck!" in his throat. He turned with incredible slowness, wishing he could seem like a statue in his turning. Then saw with alarm a large, pale, watery-blue eye that existed against a backdrop of darkness or dark rags shot through with pale flesh, and which resolved into Whitby. Whitby who had been there the entire time, crammed into the shelf right behind Control, at eye-level, bent at the knees, on his side. Breathing in shallow sharp bursts. Staring out. Like something incubating. There, on the shelf.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“Control thought of the theories as “slow death by,” given the context: Slow death by aliens. Slow death by parallel universe. Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. Death by this and by that. Death by indifference and inference. His favorite: “Surface-dwelling terrestrial organism, previously unknown.” Hiding where all of these years? In a lake?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the transformation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because human beings couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Talking around the edge of a catastrophe. But wasn’t that what people did, if you were still alive?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“Topological anomaly? Topological anomaly? Don’t you mean witchcraft? Don’t you mean the end of civilisation? Don’t you mean some kind of spooky thing that we know nothing, absolutely fucking nothing about, to go with everything else we don’t know?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“My application's not bought,' I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. 'I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex.
'I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,' I say. 'I'm not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.'

I open my eyes. 'Please don't think I don't care.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy.--Accordingly I set off thus:”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“I am not what you see and hear.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“Te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est." (Roughly, "They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.")”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.

The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from
Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that
hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the
bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve
recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not
quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from
hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and
offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic
spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little
blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent
her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower
wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated
sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North
American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All
Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the
claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer,
she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The
Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by
far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her
hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much
fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though
it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s
best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold
edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of
stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speaker’s blow, people
barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing
saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance
where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply
gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean
medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair
of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the
glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone
again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes
in and out like a savvy diver…
–and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s
lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting
muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough,
and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed
vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue
light from one sky, searching.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“[The entire text of Infinite Jest.]”
― David Foster Wallace

“What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include tooth decay in His divine system of creation? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'
'Pain?' Lieutenant Shiesskopf's wife pounced upon the word victoriously. 'Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.'
'And who created the dangers?' Yossarian demanded. 'Why couldn't He have used a doorbell to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead?'
'People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon tubes right in the middle of their foreheads.'
'They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony, don't they?”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world, will last as long as...the frog? ”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Four times during the first six days they were assembled and briefed and then sent back. Once, they took off and were flying in formation when the control tower summoned them down. The more it rained, the worse they suffered. The worse they suffered, the more they prayed that it would continue raining. All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars. All through the day, they looked at the bomb line on the big, wobbling easel map of Italy that blew over in the wind and was dragged in under the awning of the intelligence tent every time the rain began. The bomb line was a scarlet band of narrow satin ribbon that delineated the forward most position of the Allied ground forces in every sector of the Italian mainland.

For hours they stared relentlessly at the scarlet ribbon on the map and hated it because it would not move up high enough to encompass the city.

When night fell, they congregated in the darkness with flashlights, continuing their macabre vigil at the bomb line in brooding entreaty as though hoping to move the ribbon up by the collective weight of their sullen prayers. "I really can't believe it," Clevinger exclaimed to Yossarian in a voice rising and falling in protest and wonder. "It's a complete reversion to primitive superstition. They're confusing cause and effect. It makes as much sense as knocking on wood or crossing your fingers. They really believe that we wouldn't have to fly that mission tomorrow if someone would only tiptoe up to the map in the middle of the night and move the bomb line over Bologna. Can you imagine? You and I must be the only rational ones left."

In the middle of the night Yossarian knocked on wood, crossed his fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to move the bomb line up over Bologna.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Just what the hell did you mean, you bastard, when you said we couldn't punish you?" said the corporal who could take shorthand reading from his steno pad.

"All right," said the colonel. "Just what the hell did you mean?"

"I didn't say you couldn't punish me, sir."

"When," asked the colonel.

"When what, sir?"

"Now you're asking me questions again."

"I'm sorry, sir. I'm afraid I don't understand your question."

"When didn't you say we couldn't punish you? Don't you understand my question?"

"No, sir, I don't understand."

"You've just told us that. Now suppose you answer my question."

"But how can I answer it?"

"That's another question you're asking me."

"I'm sorry, sir. But I don't know how to answer it. I never said you couldn't punish me."

"Now you're telling us what you did say. I'm asking you to tell us when you didn't say it."

Clevinger took a deep breath. "I always didn't say you couldn't punish me, sir.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22