Michael Oden > Michael's Quotes

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”
― Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

“He started toward the door, then halted briefly. To the two of them he said, 'Is the owl genuine?'
Rachael glanced swiftly at the elder Rosen.
'He's leaving anyhow,' Eldon Rosen said. 'It doesn't matter; the owl is artificial. There are no owls.”
― Philip K. Dick

“When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

[Thoughts on Various Subjects]”
― Jonathan Swift , Abolishing Christianity and Other Essays

“The day before me is fraught with God knows what horrors.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Stop!' I cried imploringly to my god-like mind.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.”
― Flann O'Brien , The Third Policeman

“The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know
the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes
through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone
know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what
seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and
yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through
one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if
we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you
think. But what if you could? Think for a second — what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward,
after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward
now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in
which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized
English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s
room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets? Because
listen — we don’t have much time, here’s where Lily Cache slopes
slightly down and the banks start getting steep, and you can just make
out the outlines of the unlit sign for the farmstand that’s never open
anymore, the last sign before the bridge — so listen: What exactly do
you think you are? The millions and trillions of thoughts, memories,
juxtapositions — even crazy ones like this, you’re thinking — that flash
through your head and disappear? Some sum or remainder of these?
Your history? Do you know how long it’s been since I told you I was a
fraud? Do you remember you were looking at the respicem watch
hanging from the rearview and seeing the time, 9:17? What are you looking at right now? Coincidence? What if no time has passed at all?*
The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you
a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a
fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know
this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know
it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the
same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of
others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.”
― David Foster Wallace

“And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and did they leave their front doors open, did they leave their kids with the neighbors, pay social calls, run up tabs with the butcher? The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you. They want to hear it really was once a green and pleasant land. They need it. Archie wondered if his daughter needed it. She was looking at him funny. Her mouth downturned, her eyes almost pleading. But what could he tell her? New Years come and go, but no amount of resolutions seem to change the fact that there are bad blokes. There were always plenty of bad blokes.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth