Allison Cronin > Recent Status Updates

“I never could stand being forced to do something I didn't want to do at a time I didn't want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I’d give it everything I had.”

“I’m going to march you over to the zoo and feed you to the yak.”

And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.

I’m going to help you because you look like my brother Fred. Only smaller. I haven’t seen him since I was 14, that’s when I left home, and he was already six feet two. My other brothers were more size, runts. It was the peanut butter that made Fred so tall; everybody thought it was dotty, the way he gorged himself on peanut butter. He didn’t care about anything in this world except horses and peanut butter.

“This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.”

“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular.
And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.”

“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

“That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”

“… the patient is not aware of the empirical fact that an obsessive compulsive neurosis is immunizing him against a formal psychosis rather than endangering him in this direction.” (Re: paradoxical intention applied to obsessive compulsive cases)

“… the hypertension to fall asleep, arising from the anticipatory anxiety of not being able to do so, must be replaced by the paradoxical intention not to fall asleep, which will soon be followed by sleep.” This just fixed my brain

“…someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours—a friend, a wife , somebody alive or dead, or a God—and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly—not miserably—knowing how to die.”

“Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes man may be required to simply accept fate, to bear his cross.”

“Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human makeup, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”

“… it is certain that a new torment arises whenever another dies.”

“Conscious that I cannot stand aloof from my time, I have decided to be an integral part of it.”

“And blest are those,” says Hamlet, “whose blood and judgment are so well commingled that they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger to sound what stop she please.”

“The absurd does not liberate, it binds.”

“If he substitutes for his cry of revolt a frantic adherence, at once he is led to blind himself to the absurd which hitherto enlightened him and to deify the only certainty he henceforth possesses, the irrational.”

Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness.

History remembers the travelers themselves, the Marco Polos and Magellans and such, but the real heroes are the underwriters.

I am Joe’s Complete Lack of Surprise.

I am Joe’s Broken Heart because Tyler’s dumped me.

At the last meeting of the Assault Committee, Tyler brought a gun and the yellow pages of the phone book. They meet in the basement where fight club meets on Saturday night. Each committee meets on a different night: Arson meets on Monday. Assault on Tuesday. Mischief meets on Wednesday. And Misinformation meets on Thursday.

“Marla lives at the regent hotel, which is nothing but brown bricks held together with sleaze, where all the mattresses are sealed inside slippery plastic covers, so many people go there to die.”

“Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art.”

The concept of inventing your own context 🔥