Brian > Recent Status Updates

"I wonder what it’s like to have written your masterpiece, and to know you’ll never do it again?"

Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn’t subject to scientific analysis, and it’s not supposed to be real but it’s pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic.

Libraries really are wonderful. They’re better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.

There's an easy kind of love: it is fanatical adulation. Fans take their heroes and make them a part of their identity and so it becomes unbearable to ever really take in rumours of bad behaviour. We want them to remain perfect so we can telegraph or offload certain archetypes on to them. If we turn people into symbols and then create a fandom around them, we don't have to take on those responsibilities ourselves.

No matter the period, past or present, corruption can only persist to such an extent if it is widespread throughout the society that, in one form or another, provides cover or reward for it.

Thought cain: lucifer was quite right when he rebelled against god, and those who say he did so out of envy are wrong, he simply recognized god’s evil nature.

The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn’t understand us, and we don’t understand him.

What is my apology for poetry?
The empty briar is swishing
When I come down, and beyond, your face
Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.

Despite a 1969 presidential order prohibiting the production or storing of biological-warfare agents, MK-ULTRA receipts for biological and laboratory supplies revealed that the dissemination of disease-carrying mosquitoes in Florida beginning in 1955 and 1956 triggered a long history of domestic bioterrorism by the U.S. government against its own citizens through at least 1972.

Mrs. Ladbrook had pinned a drawing of the dinosaur on the blackboard and had explained that the great unwieldy animal with its minute head had been all body but little brain, and had accordingly failed to adapt and had perished. Even at ten years of age he had found the explanation unconvincing. The dinosaur, with its small brain, had survived for a couple of million years; it had done better than Homo sapiens.

Chris Roper was my boss. He generally didn’t make it out of the Green Zone but when a congressional delegation swung through, Roper tagged along to do a bit of war tourism. Nobody wants to do a year in Iraq and come back with nothing but stories about the soft-serve ice-cream machine at the embassy cafeteria.

I try to find comfort with lying every day, practicing mostly on myself.

That in truth stories always finish badly, everyone dies and humanity will continue to delude itself until the end of time, if the sun does not die prematurely.

No one is ever exactly who they claim to be, but some people are closer than others.

And then, too, there was the simple, troubling question of who should determine "justice" in war.

This is the way someone looks when history lodges in their throat, and I know I’m now meant to hear a story, specifically, hers.

Like many my age, I had discovered solitude and pride, two monsters that happily marry and then devour their host.

I learned early ... that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

All the sorrows he met on the road remained at their stations, waiting for his children to come along. You sing the sad songs first, then you act them out.

Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight. The rest is survival.

It had never occurred to him that furniture could be sick, but from that day on he knew it when he saw it, the way human beings infected everything.

“No matter what we claim in public, in private we all know that the only law and the only god is money. If you have enough of it, you don’t have to suffer consequences and you don’t have to suffer for your ideals, you just foist them on someone else and feel good about the nobility of your intentions.”

As he gets closer he sees that her face looks like it was attacked by trees in a fairy tale.