Yann Rousselot > Yann's Quotes

“I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“We can stick anything into the fog
and make it look like a ghost
but tonight
let us not become tragedies.
We are not funeral homes
with propane tanks in our windows,
lookin’ like cemeteries.
Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.
Let go.

Tonight
let’s turn our silly wrists so far backwards
the razor blades in our pencil tips
can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.
Step into this
with your airplane parts.
Move forward
and repeat after me with your heart:

“I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.”

Make love to me
like you know I am better
than the worst thing I ever did.
Go slow.
I’m new to this.
But I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop
without jumping.
I have realized

that the moon
did not have to be full for us to love it,
that we are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it,
that if my heart
really broke
every time I fell from love
I’d be able to offer you confetti by now.

But hearts don’t break,
y’all,
they bruise and get better.
We were never tragedies.
We were emergencies.
You call 9 – 1 – 1.
Tell them I’m having a fantastic time.”
― Buddy Wakefield

“He’s stuck out there. He thinks he’s totally alone and that we all gave up on him. What kind of effect does that have on a man’s psychology?” He turned back to Venkat. “I wonder what he’s thinking right now.”

LOG ENTRY: SOL 61 How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.”
― David Rakoff, Fraud

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.”
― Henry James

“The fairy tale is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me: the school stories did. All stories in which children have adventures and successes which are possible, in the sense that they do not break the laws of nature, but almost infinitely improbable, are in more danger than the fairy tales of raising false expectations…

This distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes—things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is an askesis, a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease.”
― C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I know my breasts, small
as plums, would win no blue ribbons.

But in your hands they tremble and fill
with song like plump, white birds.”
― Cecilia Llompart, The Wingless

“My love for Neo-Tokyo is a bulbous mass
of post-human organic circuitry.
Cyperpunk is my mother tongue.
My love is a man-machine interface gun.”
― Yann Rousselot, Dawn of the Algorithm

“we roar along the rust belts——the great red spot——
the polar vortex——the caress of solar flares——
ruffle the molten methane and ammonia oceans of me——
the storm-riven non-surface of me and mine——
that which you call skin——
a threadbare term to describe where I stop and others begin——”
― Yann Rousselot, Dawn of the Algorithm

“I've swallowed fish-eyes whole
like an endoscope.
I once ate a trout cooked inside a dolphin.
Felt like a shark eating another shark,
inside the cold-blooded womb of yet another shark.”
― Yann Rousselot, Dawn of the Algorithm

“Give me your honest opinion. I don't want truth with a veil on—I like naked ladies naked.”
― Christina Stead, Miss Herbert (the suburban wife)

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“A word is also a picture of a word.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“I am not like
other people.
I am
burning in hell. the hell of
myself.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Hope is the heaviest weight a man can carry. It is the bane of the idealist.”
― Raimundo Arruda Sobrinho

“Не доверяй таким людям как я. Я буду водить тебя в музеи, парки, к памятникам, буду целовать тебя в самых красивых местах, так что ты никогда не сможешь туда вернуться не вспоминая меня, словно кровь во рту. Я уничтожу тебя самым прекрасным способом, который только возможен. А когда я покину тебя, ты поймешь, почему штормы называют человеческими именами.

Do not fall in love with people like me.
I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth.
I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand, why storms are named after people.”
― Caitlyn Siehl, Literary Sexts: A Collection of Short & Sexy Love Poems

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“How insufficient the memory, to fail before death.
how will hear these notes when the train slides
into the yard, the lights turned out, and the song

lingers with breaths rising from empty seats?
I know I am too human to praise what is fading.
But for now, I just want to listen as the train fills

completely with warm water, and we are all
swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart
flowing from his hands. I want nothing

but to put my fingers inside his mouth,
let that prayer hum through my veins.
I want crawl into the hole in his violin.

I want to sleep there
until my flesh
becomes music.”
― Ocean Vuong

“Fuckin failures in a country of failures. Its nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant healthy society to be colonised by. No..we are ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wis the shite thev got. Ah hate the Scots.”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Citlaltépetl is as old as the world, but to this day, no man, native or Spaniard, has yet climbed all the way to the top of it. If anyone ever did, the passing stars would probably scrape him off his perch.”
― Gary Jennings, Aztec

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream