Alex Jones

“we had the goldfish and they went around and around
in the bowl on the table near the purple drapes
across our front picture window and
my mother, poor fish, always smiling, wanting to
appear happy, she always told me, "be happy, Henry,"
and she was right: it's better to be happy if you
can be
but my father beat her two or three times a week while
raging through his 6 foot two frame because he couldn't
defeat what was attacking him.

my mother, poor fish, poor goldfish, poor nothing fish,
wanting to be happy, being beaten two or three times a
week and telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!
why don't you smile?

and then, she always did to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw upon the earth, like hell and
hell and hell and hell, and nothing else

one day all the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on top of the water, on their sides, the
eye on each top side still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled”
― Charles Bukowski

“There’s never any escape from anything at all. You’re always going to be burned. There is never any pleasantness, easiness anywhere. You’ll be burned down to the grave. No matter how much you know, no matter how much you feel, you’re going to be burned, burned, burned till the last minute you breathe. When you open a cap on a mustard jar, you’re gonna be burned. If you open up a can of cat food, you’re gonna be burned. Everything is burning. All you’re trying to do is walk across a room and drink a glass of water and take it easy. There’s always things burning, ripping at you. It’s the whole universe. It’s everything. Women, men, friends, everything. Rips and tears, man. Rips and tears.”
― Charles Bukowski

“This is why it would be nice to hear more about principles and less about ruffled feelings. What thoughtful person has not felt the hurt expressed by the Jews over some performances of The Merchant of Venice? A whole anthology of black writing exists in the United States, protesting with quite unfeigned horror about the teaching of Huckleberry Finn in the schools, for the good and sufficient reason that the book employs the word ‘nigger’ as natural. A mature and sensitive response to such tenderness of feeling and consciousness of historic wrong would run much like this, and could be uttered by a person of any race or religion ... We know why you feel as you do, but – too bad. Your thinness of skin, however intelligible, will not be healed by the amputation of the literary and theatrical and musical canon. You just have to live with Shakespeare and Dickens and Twain and Wagner, mainly because they are artistically integral but also, as it happens, because they represent certain truths about human nature. Think for a second. Would prejudice diminish with the banning of Shylock? Concern for the emotions of others cannot license a category mistake on this scale.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Music made my day so much easier. Walking through the halls at school was somehow easier; sitting alone all the time was easier. I loved that no one could tell i was listening to music and that, because no one knew, i was never asked to turn it off. I'd had multiple conversations with teachers who had no idea i was only half hearing whatever they were saying to me, and for some reason this made me happy. Music seemed to steady me like a second skeleton; I leaned on it when my own bones were too shaken to stand. I always listened to music on the iPod i'd stolen from my brother, and here- as i did last year, when he first bought the thing- I walked to class like i was listening to the soundtrack of my own shitty movie. It gave me an inexplecable kind of hope.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea