Damon > Recent Status Updates

She had a smell like someone had squirted perfume on the dumpster behind a Hooters.

"The human carcass is a sheath and every soul a sword. You already have the blade you need."

It was Donna who she pitied most. Donna, who would never get even with a world that kept taking good people away from her, destroying them before her eyes. She was not furious because she hated.

She was furious because she loved.

"Everyone dies," Donna said. "It's just a question of when and how ugly."

Is it necessarily true that we would detect meaningful patterns, in the same sense of our own intelligence level, in the behavior of a superior race? Is it not much more likely that we would find in their actions only random data and incoherent pictures, much as a dog would if confronted with a mathematician writing on a blackboard?

Allie had begun to crawl. "Where do you think you're going, bitch?" Horation pressed the barrel against the back of her skull. "There's nowhere to run to, and no heroes left."

Allie began to crawl. "Where do you think you're going, bitch?" Horation pressed the barrel against the back of her neck. "There's nowhere to run to and no heroes left."

"It's the red backdrop of American life. The slave labor in Indonesia that made your sneakers. The miner dying of black lung so we can turn on the lights. The construction worker who fell off a high girder so the World Trade towers could kiss the sky. Because we care about each other, we make peace with a certain level of horror."

"No one should presume to read the universe till he has first read and mastered his own soul."

Petroleum poisons Capital with absolute madness, a planetary plague bleeding into economies mobilized by the technological singularities of advanced civilizations. In the wake of oil as an autonomous terrestrial conspirator, Capitalism is not a human symptom but rather a planetary inevitability. In other words, Capitalism was here even before human existence, waiting for a host.

He loved it, had always loved it, the way an ancient word felt in the brain, in the mouth. Heartache was an okay word, but bitre breostcaere-- bitter breast-care-- caught at something else, something more deeply felt, from a time when people lived in their bodies, not in their heads.

Mortal passion sinks us in mortal pleasure, so that the wings of the soul grow weak; and such lovers may rise to the good indeed, but not to the very best. The winged soul rises from love to love, from the beautiful that is born and dies, to beauty in itself eternal; the life itself, of which mortal beauty is only a moving shadow flung upon a wall.

"What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?"

"True feeling is always circular -- either circular, or paradoxical -- simply because its cause and its expression are two halves of the very same thing. Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love. Any man who disagrees with me has never been in love -- not truly."

He possessed a fault common to those of high intelligence, which was that he tended to regard the gift of his intellect as a license of a kind, by whose rarefied authority he was protected, in all circumstances, from ever behaving ill. He considered his moral obligations to be of an altogether different class than those of lesser men, and so rarely felt shame or compunction, except in very general terms.

"There's another barbarism," she said. "Your temper."
"You've never seen my temper."
"Have I not?"
"Never. With you, I'm a civilized man."
"With whom are you uncivilized, one wonders."
"It's not a matter of with whom," he responded. "It's a matter of how far."

When he was with her, a pure and liquid adoration filled the chambers of his heart. Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.

He pampered her in all the ways that he was able, but became very hurt when she did not notice the efforts he had made -- and when she did not notice his hurt, he became angry. His anger was both unsustainable and unsustaining; it did not nourish him, as men are sometimes nourished by their own rage. Instead the emotion only diminished him, leaving him all the emptier -- and, therefore, all the more ready to love.

How silently the world revolves, when one is brooding, and alone.

A belief for him was a thirst. Whenever the subterranean waters of his mind were disturbed, he plunged inward, and struggled downward -- kicking strongly, purposefully, as if he wished to touch the mineral depths of his own dark fantasies, as if he wished to drown.

For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done -- a judgement that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

For one could not put a price upon a treasure, just as one could not purchase mana, and one could not make a bargain with god. Gold was not a treasure -- this he knew. Gold was like all capital in that it had no memory: it's drift was always onward, away from the past.

Shelley often woke up the morning after a sexual encounter with a feeling of manifest exposure, as though she'd been secretly recorded in the act and the recording was now being screened, at high resolution, on her body and across her face. It was a sensation not of shame, but of transgressive near-exhilaration, and that morning she had felt it even more acutely than on the day that she'd had sex for the first time.

"The real choices that you make in your life, the really difficult, defining choices, are never between what's right and what's easy. They're between what's wrong and what's hard."

As he conjured her deliciously inside himself, he realized, all at once, that she would be his acquisition. She would be his venture. She would be the final piece of camouflage. Not these dime-a-dozen, grasping, self-important outrage-mongers, these obsequious nonentities, these small time pseudo-pundits who traded in stupidity and called themselves subversive for shitting where they ate.

He wasn't a different person. She was the one who had changed.

She hated how the divorce had come to quantify her relationships with both her parents, such that one weekend dinner with her mother now placed her one weekend dinner with her father in debt, and every conversation, every holiday, every shared interest, even every congenital resemblance now felt inscribed in a vast ledger of credit and debit that somehow it was her responsibility to balance.

He in no way opposed the fundamental aims of feminism, and indeed would have welcomed, he felt sure, any well-argued point in its favor; but over the course of his twenties, he had found himself increasingly at odds with the prevailing orthodoxies of the contemporary feminist left, which seemed to him to have abandoned the worthy goal of equality between the sexes in pursuit of either naked self-interest or revenge.

She had lived for as long as she could remember in perpetual dread of being dislikeable -- a fate far worse than being disliked, for it encompassed not only her relationships with others, but her private judgements of herself.

Tears feel cold against skin flushed with shame.