avery > Recent Status Updates

“He laughed. ‘Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.’
‘I seem,’ I said, ‘to have heard this song before.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Giovanni, ‘and you will certainly hear it again. It is one of those songs that somebody somewhere will always be singing.’”

“People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.”

“But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore then they can invent their parents. Life gives you these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

“I had yet to learn that nothing in this world can ever match the marvels that we conjure up in our own minds.”

“And there I was, trying so hard to penetrate someone else’s mind, to find out if the soul hiding inside it was ordered or in turmoil. For even the most wretched and simple-minded man could be a surprise, even a fool could have a soul whose torments were a constant source of amazement.”

“It’s difficult to stop loving someone, even when they have done something that you once thought unforgivable. There isn’t an off switch for love” (182)

“Sunk in the grass of an empty parking lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.” (p.97)

“The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, done cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything.”

“What might compel a martyr to martyrdom:
- god
- beauty
- family
- land
- love
- history
- justice
- desire
- sex
Martyr. I want to scream it in an airport. I want to die killing the president. Ours and everyone’s. I want them all to have been right to fear me. Right to have killed my mother, to have ruined my father. I want to be worthy of the great terror my existence inspires.”

“People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.”

I found my new goat, Sigal’s work is groundbreaking.

“…And when He has done with all of them, then He will summon us. ‘You too come forth,’ He will say. ‘Come forth, ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth, ye children of shame!’ And we shall all come forth, without shame and shall stand before Him. And He will say unto us; ‘Ye are swine made in the image of the Beast and with his mark; but come ye also!’…”

“On earth it’s impossible to live and not to lie, for life and lying are synonymous; well, but here for the fun of it we won’t lie.”

“In my opinion, the one who’s smarter than all the rest is the one who calls himself a fool at least once a month — an unheard of talent nowadays!”

“What happens to nationalism, to political boundaries, when allegiance lies with winds and waters that know no boundaries, that cannot be bought or sold?”

I cannot put this shit down. But I so desperately do not want to finish it because I’ve been enjoying it a little too much. :(

shit is getting wicked