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I have noticed that sometimes I frighten people; what they really fear is themselves. They think it is I who scare them, but it is the dwarf within them, the ape-faced manlike being who sticks up its head from the depth of their souls. They are afraid because they do not know that they have another being inside them. They are scared when anything rises to the surface, from their inside, out of some of the cesspools..

Humans, in their vapid stupidity, always associate the new with the great, cannot see beyond their own nose, and forget an event ten seconds after it has occurred. If this is progress, please let me die in my sleep this evening. If this is progress, let the world burn, I want no more of it.

If a man is silent, he is stoic, if a woman is silent, she is a bitch, a childish word I abhor. Why is this? Why is a silent woman feared? Why does the world continue to move in opposite directions, pulling itself apart by greed, by ignorance, by the small tail between men's legs?

This may not be a novel, but it's taking forever for me to read it.

It is an aspect of probability that many improbable things will happen.

Written with the imagination of a drunken savage.
Said Voltaire of Hamlet.

No great talent has ever existed without a tinge of madness, Seneca says Aristotle said.

All poets are mad, Robert Burton corroborated.

The height of absurdity in serving up pure nonsense, or in stringing together senseless and extravagant masses of words, previously seen only in madhouses, was reached in Hegel.
Said Schopenhauer.

On the first floor, which was more a suggestion of a life than the actual lives we lived, several bookshelves lined the walls, filled with garbage books, a wall of commonality reserved for guests who never browsed.

The field dips in pollen-flecked waves, my legs carrying me forward, my feet uncontrolled farm equipment destroying the soil as I walk, my childhood erupting in cakewarm black piles. In the clearing, along the edge of gold, sudden horror as the field drops away into black fathomless water. The water stretches as far as I can see, an eternal sheet of black glass.

There was a large rock near. She hurled her head at the stone, so that she broke her skull and was dead.
Says the earliest version of Deirdre of the Sorrows.

Before the Normans brought despair, the Anglo-Saxon word was wanhope.

Anyone feel like trying to convince me to keep reading this? All the histrionic verbiage on the front and back cover make me want to throw it at the wall.

A writer, like a solitary carpenter bee, will hoard scraps from the manifold and then proceed to gnaw obsessively, constructing a long gallery, nesting her very existence within her food. The eater vanishes. The characters in the long gallery emerge.

Those creatures and worlds that we know only in sleep and dream and mythology—of yesterday and today—the magical technology—are emerging as usual reality in the new dimension of living and dying. And when the unreal has been accepted and made real, new realities will present themselves, forces which become gentlenesses, gentlenesses which become forces.

Evening. On the virginal mountain there is a glow like the blooming of heavenly hyacinth in a dark, dark field. My own warmth goes out of me with the light. I am as cold as the shadows, I am chill denial, chaos again, the unnamed thing.

Realizing that, of necessity, an ill person is unsexed, I try to wring a cold mental harmony out of life, but, instead I find myself sucked inward, my intellect smothered as by a voluptuous and nauseating rhythm. What I most long for is to be able not to desire anything, for I think of all life as gradually and eternally becoming nothing.

I realize now that deep down in everyone is an instinct of being, unaffected by the values which consciousness imposes. This being is impersonal, undefined, a mere gesture which asserts life and takes no account of obligation or consequence. I want to be saved from myself, from the terrible self from which all my secondary life proceeds, the self which goes with closed eyes toward its own end.

The love of those among whom one has been reared is usually not love at all. One can die inwardly without any of them being aware of it.

I feel sometimes as if Death were holding me softly in a feathered palm, feeding me with the white blood of sorrow. And I think of a lost bird flying toward a gray horizon it will never reach, above the broken mirrors of marshes and the gray fur of reeds, endless!

The heat was the visible expression of a terrible silence, a silence in which the cracked voices of the old women were as irrelevant as the discordant notes of far-off birds. A stasis of life had created a vortex of intensity, a stillness into which life poured itself with the vividness of death.

Employers are always swine; either that or insidious stinking dogs. There's no happy medium. I'd be content with just a slightly dirty swine, but they don't seem to exist.

The long tentacles of vision and understanding have withdrawn and all that is left is the ragged black hole of my loss. Loss and the world around. A noisy puzzle whose solution is another puzzle noisier and more stupid. The circle widens toward nothing.

Words are treacherous because they re incomplete. The written word hangs in time like a lump of lead. Everything should move with the ages and the planets.

Porpentine found it necessary to believe if one appointed oneself savior of humanity that perhaps one must love that humanity only in the abstract. For any descent to the personal level can make a purpose less pure. Whereas a disgust at individual human perversity might as easily avalanche into a rage for apocalypse.

He wondered every once in a while what life would be like without a second story and how it was people managed to get along in ranch-style or split-level houses without running amok once a year or so.

Half the time it was like being on acid and talking to someone not knowing what level the conversation was really operating on. Are we actually talking about this stupid band? Or that dumb girl? Or are we having the real conversation? The one that never stops in the Subterranea.

Up the street I heard the jackhammers. They're building a supermarket made of mud. It's going to have valet parking, be completely organic and only fish that was inhabited by the souls of former rapists will be sold. Workers will get emergency room coupons and free coffee.

The U.S. federal government has the biggest detention system in the world, paying more than $3 billion per year to lock up around 40,000 immigrants every day around the country [note: as of June 2025, the number of detainees is nearly 60,000].

This feels pretty relevant to the present moment.