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“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
― Looking for Alaska
― Looking for Alaska
“So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
― Looking for Alaska
― Looking for Alaska
“The Chorus Line:
A Rope-Jumping Rhyme
we are the maids
the ones you killed
the ones you failed
we danced in air
our bare feet twitched
it was not fair
with every goddess, queen, and bitch
from there to here
you scratched your itch
we did much less
than what you did
you judged us bad
you had the spear
you had the word
at your command
we scrubbed the blood
of our dead
paramours from floors, from chairs
from stairs, from doors,
we knelt in water
while you stared
at our bare feet
it was not fair
you licked our fear
it gave you pleasure
you raised your hand
you watched us fall
we danced on air
the ones you failed
the ones you killed”
― The Penelopiad
A Rope-Jumping Rhyme
we are the maids
the ones you killed
the ones you failed
we danced in air
our bare feet twitched
it was not fair
with every goddess, queen, and bitch
from there to here
you scratched your itch
we did much less
than what you did
you judged us bad
you had the spear
you had the word
at your command
we scrubbed the blood
of our dead
paramours from floors, from chairs
from stairs, from doors,
we knelt in water
while you stared
at our bare feet
it was not fair
you licked our fear
it gave you pleasure
you raised your hand
you watched us fall
we danced on air
the ones you failed
the ones you killed”
― The Penelopiad
“What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.”
― Looking for Alaska
― Looking for Alaska
“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”
― Looking for Alaska
― Looking for Alaska
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