Joseph Patterson

“Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It's gone, but we remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The most frightening thing in the world is to discover the abnormal in that which is closest to us.”
― Kobo Abe