Alfreien > Recent Status Updates

And he, the man I loved since I was fourteen, chased me away with a green switch. He beat my ankles raw. And I dishonored him? I dishonored him?! Where was he? Buying a pot? He was too proud to bear my shame . . . but not proud enough to protect me from it. Let him sit in the rain.

He’ll see you, love will flood into his eyes, he’ll tell you everything you want to hear, and then one morning, I know how it happens, he will begin to ask ugly questions, but he won’t be able to hear the answers. And no matter what you say, he won’t be satisfied. I know. And, chérie, don’t look away from me, will you be able to tell him the truth? Huh? We know, don’t we? The woman he loved is dead.

Knowledge, fol survival any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living think a consciousness, every "is' implies an "ought.”

“I turned and looked at the waves of flame sweeping each floor and I wondered, Where do my tears go? Why is it that I can’t cry now when I need to? Yet I knew that later my tears would be unexpectedly triggered by the scent of lilacs, or the low hum of a cello.”

“Amy smiled at her mother and curled against her breast. “Mommy, is that a girl or a man?” she asked, looking up at Joan. 

Joan flashed me an apologetic expression and turned back to Amy. “That’s Jess,” she said. ”

“I wanted to find out who I was, to define myself. Whoever I was, I wanted to deal with it, I wanted to live it again. I wanted to be able to explain my life, how the world looked from behind my eyes. ”

I don’t like this.

“I don’t feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body. I just feel trapped.”

Theresa touched her cheek. “If you’re afraid to lose what you love, you’ll never be able to let go and feel it. I’ll put all my love for you in a ring if you’ll wear it. And if someone ever takes it from you, all they’ll be able to steal is a metal band. Then I’ll go out and get you another ring and put all my love in that one. That way you’ll never lose it, Jess. OK?”

“But Theresa could always sense when I was about to petrify like stone. She could see it coming by the way I held my body as I walked in the door.“

It seems there is some kind of solace to be found in regret. It serves as an escape from what's right before your eyes. You end up pinning all your bad deeds on the "former you." So it's hardly self-condemnation. When you are regretting something, you're technically being good.

“Dust the dust… That’s all I can say. And you did good, kid. You did real good. How’s that for a compliment? But you gotta try a little harder than that. If you’re dissatisfied, don’t pretend you aren’t. Make what’s unstable stable. Drive the irrational into the rational. Don’t write your thoughts off as worthless sentiment. M’kay?”

“That which is incomplete can’t help but seem modern.”

“As he hurried to banish from his mind merely dutiful concern for this reticent, precocious, bothersome child, this boy whom he didn’t really love, Ryuji managed to convince himself that he was brimming with genuine fatherly affection. It”

“And it proved that Ryuji had been right to take off half a day in order to amuse Noboru and his friends. Right, he knew, in terms of a father’s moral obligation. Most books and magazines would agree. ”

“Noboru had a pleasant vision of the lightning in the adults’ gaze illuminating the life on shore that Ryuji dreamed about and Fusako’s wholesome household as they crashed noisily into rubble—but his excitement had led him to overestimate the power of his imagination. He had been expecting an impassioned reaction.”

“She had been quick to interpret the reality, and inasmuch as her banal interpretation was the cause of all her agitation, no clever excuse from him would be to any purpose.”

“Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?” he said. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”

“Nor had he mentioned his concept of ideal love: a man encounters the perfect woman only once in a lifetime and in every case death interposes—an unseen Pandarus—and lures them into the preordained embrace”

(2/?)

this seems like an overly idealistic perspective. the government produces goods, too, the distinction being that they’re non-excludable. but can’t the same be said for institutions that sell goods necessary for human life, such as grocery stores?

similarly to governments, other institutions are self-serving. a thief would not be permitted to steal goods merely because the government does not exist.

(1/2)

“While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.”

“Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.”

will have to see if this definition is sensible

“If you are bound by your past hour, if you must babble today because you babbled yesterday, if you cannot transform yourself each instant, you feel yourself fettered to slavery and benumbed.”

“The conscious experience is not merely wedded to the word, but is consumed by it.”

“We may recall the examples of it which Spieth adduces: water found by a thirsty person, a termite mound that hides and saves someone, any new object that inspires a man with sudden terror-all these are transformed directly into gods.”

“The aim of theoretical thinking, as we have seen, is primarily to deliver the contents of sensory or intuitive experience from the isolation in which they originally occur. It causes these contents to transcend their narrow limits, combines them with others, compares them, and concatenates them in a definite order, in an all-inclusive context.”

“For all the concepts of theoretical knowledge constitute merely an upper stratum of logic which is founded upon a lower stratum, that of the logic of language.”

“All theoretical cognition takes its departure from a world already preformed by language; the scientist, the historian, even the philosopher, lives with his objects only as language presents them to him.”

gf took my bookmark out gotta remember

During his boyhood, he would describe Kircheis’s hair according to his whim: whenever they were quarreling—a state that never lasted very long—he would say mean things like, “What’s with that red hair? It looks like blood.” Then after they made up, he would praise it, calling it “really pretty, like a burning flame. (2/2)

Reinhard stretched out his long, supple fingers and playfully tugged at his best friend’s hair, as red as if dyed with molten rubies. Reinhard would do this sort of thing from time to time when no one else was around. (1/2)