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.. Earth to earth, your body, too, is of the earth, and I could feel the earth in my legs, how heavy they were and the earth in my abdomen, how heavy it was, it was throbbing restlessly.

The darkness helped me cope. I hid in the darkness, I stepped away from the yellow pools under the streetlights and became invisible under the spiky, naked branches of the tall birches, I walked up to their knobbly trunks, I leaned against them, hugged them and thought they talked and whispered to me:

I had felt something uncontrollable stir in me, a desire to break for the border, a sense that I contained bombs that might go off if I drank enough, and a great thirst, an irresistible compulsion to drink just enough to make those very bombs explode.

Her fear created me because her fear and imagination go together.

Anything you want to forget will come back to you, it will haunt you so vividly that it feels as if you’re going through it all over again, often causing you the same overwhelming and unmanageable feelings as it did the first time; you fear the intensity might kill you and so you fight its return, you resist, but you can’t prevent or shield yourself from the pain that follows and so you are forced to relive it.

“There is a rationale to everything,” Doha once said. “When something seems out of order, it is usually an effect of a cause. Nothing is random. So if you see your enemies do something unusual, you must find out why that is happening. Or get the hell out of there at least.”

"I'm sure you will. All Koreans, no matter how far we go, no matter how much we forget or ignore it, we all miss home.
That's why we're so happy to see one another abroad."

“.. Their race for more borders on insanity. But if you want, you can go and join that race. They have a word for that. It's called the American dream. I think it's a wonderful concept. Like everyone is living the same self-centred delusion."

"Americans don't know modesty," Doha says. "They crave extremes and mask it under the veil of freedom. They work all waking hours to collect more money than they could ever spend. They shove more food down their throats despite it slowly killing them.”

"I never felt at home back in my country. It's a funny thing. To be told that you belong somewhere and feel nothing for it. That's why I don't feel like going back ever. I'm fine here.”

“..They want the right amount of risk, where the balance of consequence and benefit is equal. And if they believe we hold certain pieces of the puzzle, they'll come for us then. But for now, they'll watch from afar. And they'll do nothing."

"Information. These people thrive on knowing. They are careful surveyors of risk, which guides all their actions. Too much risk, they don't act. Too little risk, they'll be suspicious…”

Why kill myself, thought Louise. If life is nothing and death is nothing, why make a lateral move?

If humans were entirely subjective, the only truth she had access to was subjective truths and not objective/ultimate truths. Everything is true from a particular perspective, and also everything is false from a particular perspective. And around this point in her reverie was when the nihilism kicked in…truth’s truthfulness didn’t matter so long as the lies weren’t affecting her directly.

Remy saw her as an artist simply by being female, doing what women had always done: creating life. The thought was far too simple to be Catherine’s invention, but that was the power of the blues, the yellows, to make the mundane into something revelatory.

“Think about life as a fence,” said Miss Winkle. “And each time we transgress, each time we hurt one another, we must tap a nail into that fence. When we’re ready, we can pull those nails out of the fence. But even still, there will be holes.” “Can the holes be fixed?” asked Bud. “Can they be patched?” Miss Winkle shook her head. Bud’s shoulders sunk.

“Am I really the woman of your dreams?”
“Who cares!” said Bud. “You’re the woman of my reality.”

“Scarcity fosters desire,” the man went on. “That’s true of parties and it’s true of business…”

Death was a problem Harper could not solve. The girls at school were vicious to weirdos, outcasts, and outsiders. God is to grace as schoolgirl is to cruelty. So Harper connected with the other outcasts and outsiders.

..death is just another job.

They will say he was a masochist who loved death. They will say he was a sadist who deserved what he got and they will make that kid a hero. Who killed Pasolini? I will tell you. Everyone.

He says: What I mean is, I go down to hell and I discover things that do not bother other people. But be careful. Hell is rising and it’s coming at you. He says: Everybody knows that, as a person, I do pay for what I say. But there are also my books and my films that end up paying for me. Maybe I’m wrong after all, but I keep on thinking that we are all in danger.

He says that he is not interested in the culpability of individuals. He says that it is a total system.

He thinks consumerism is a new fascism because there is so much violence hidden inside it, because it destroys nature and natural behaviour.

He’s listened to Pasolini talk about it, how cinema harvests reality, gathering up what would otherwise decay and die. Film is captured time, time arrested.

The boys Pasolini chases are all the same. They are the same boy, infinitely reproduced. Perhaps there was an original once, up in the hills. Pockmarked, slim-hipped, cunning, poor.

Comme une porte ouverte sur les allées d’un jardin enchanté,

what my ambiguous love of liberty was against. What is his ambiguous love of liberty against? Boredom, convention, stasis.

the past is not past, that there is a porosity to time that talk of historic eras, discrete moments succeeding one another, can only imperfectly conceal. This age, that age, the war, the economic miracle. Salò is a new account of time, the perpetual wounding present of I will take.

..Pasolini says, we are demonstrating that facts are immaterial in fascism, that truth is dead, that meaning is on a permanent migration.