Michala

“One day he and Sutcliffe were walking down Madison Avenue when a man they knew came up and told them a mutual friend had just died in San Francisco. “Of it?” they gasped. “No,” the man said, “he was run over by a taxicab.” “Oh, thank God!” They both said in unison. That was where AIDS stood in the hierarchy of misfortune, somehow; in a class by itself—so grim its aura extended to the fact, he thinks as he enters the nursing home, that people who don’t have AIDS imagine somehow they’re not going to die.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Beauty of Men

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“You may be paralyzed from the neck down, you may have itchy skin and only one good eye, you may wake up every day still paralyzed, still in this nursing home, you may not be able to feed, bathe, or brush your teeth or wipe your butt or walk or dance or drive a car or take a shower or do one thing you want to do, including scratching your nose but you can't die, because everyone else has and you're all I've got.”
― Andrew Holleran

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka