Barrett > Recent Status Updates

I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible

“The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that’s the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star …”

“Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark”

“
Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him.
“

“a terrible place, a cursed place,” he said dreamily—cities and cities buried beneath each other, cities torn down, cities burnt and their bricks melted to glass … a terrible place, he said absently, a cursed place

“I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man’s float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality—talk, footsteps, slamming doors—which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.”

Re-reading aloud with Sydni :-)

“…we’d done our errands, not to mention an awful lot of cocaine in the parking lot of Burger King…”

“I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos”

“
And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.
“

“What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you’d ever seen was a child’s picture—blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it? You don’t know what Dionysus looks like. We’re talking about God here. God is serious business.”

“
But even that day, there on the porch, with Charles beside me and the smell of wood smoke in the air, it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe
“

He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word “postmodernist.”
…

“Seth,” she said coldly, “is a genius.”
“Is that so? Then he’s certainly a master of deception, isn’t he?”

“The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,” he said, “was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws—this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos.”

“subsidizing the railroad, the government could also solve the so-called Indian question by stimulating rapid population growth that would make Western settlements “strong enough to protect themselves and the surrounding country.@

Rereading the goat.

"Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it."

“The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of… perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.”

“The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.”

“Always ready to consider myself too good for everything—to toss my head and say, No, thanks! I saw now what it led to. I was out in the street again. Even when I had the opportunity I couldn’t keep my good warm lodging. No; I must needs be proud, jump up at the first word, and show I wasn’t the man to stand trifling, chuck half-sovereigns right and left, and go my way.”

Oh NOW he recognizes this

“The poor intelligent man is a far nicer observer than the rich intelligent man. The poor man looks about him at every step he takes, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets, every step he takes affords in this way a task for his thoughts and feelings—an occupation. He is quick of hearing, and sensitive; he is an experienced man, his soul bears the sears of the fire…”

“I tell you, you Heaven’s Holy Baal, you don’t exist; but that, if you did, I would curse you so that your Heaven would quiver with the fire of hell! I tell you, I have offered you my service, and you repulsed me; and I turn my back on you for all eternity…

I tell you, from this hour I renounce all thy works and all thy pomps!“

“I tore myself out, sick with hunger, and boiling with shame. I had turned myself into a dog for the sake of a miserable bone, and I had not got it. Nay, now there must be an end of this! It had really gone all too far with me”

“I found all the benches occupied, and I sought in vain all round outside the church for a quiet seat, where I could sit down.
Naturally. I told myself, gloomily—naturally, naturally; and I commenced to walk again”

Yossarian? Is that you??

“I had remarked so plainly that, whenever I had been hungry for any length of time, it was just as if my brains ran quite gently out of my head and left me with a vacuum—my head grew light and far off, I no longer felt its weight on my shoulders, and I had a consciousness that my eyes stared far too widely open when I looked at anything.”

As soon as I write my article, it’s over for you bitches

“You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.”

“I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pity me?”

“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling, but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death—a state which I feared yet did not understand”