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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.

This is the strongest message we can transmit to young people: If you cannot change the world, you can change yourself. Do not let yourself be dominated. (Mujica)

The notion that the internal combustion engine is essential to human welfare is proving almost impossible to eradicate from the public mind.

We call terror what others do to us, but not what we do to them. That is how terror is defined in the United States. (Chomsky)

If we look to the early stages of industrialization, workers regarded what they called wage slavery as something akin to classical slavery. Why should they follow someone else's orders? Over time, this has been engrained in the general consciousness as normality, and it must be eradicated from our consciousness. (Chomsky)

Like a pellet of indigestible offal I wait in the owl's black maw of night to be ejected into the void.

I'm alone in a train, in a second class compartment, carrying with me, instead of luggage, instead of a brain, a tightly entwined mass of small grey snakes in my skull.

The generalized dark war is the only concrete perspective for a community whose behaviors are aberrant in practically every domain. Everything is drifting permanently toward the atrocious and unacceptable, nothing is rational, models of analysis no longer apply.

My life is like many others. It is like nothing.
It has no reason to be.

We knew that the exhausting modification of the climate would continue, that the summer would grow longer, would reach twelve months a year and even more, and that our lives would forever be populated with spiders and death and moments of unconsciousness or semiconsciousness. We could sense that it was unlikely that we would one day see the dawn or the awakening.

Those who have survived remain socially organized, but they no longer believe in themselves, or in society. They've inherited political systems to which they've lost the keys; for them ideology is a prayer devoid of meaning. The ruling classes have become criminalized, the poor obey them. Both classes act as if they were already dead. And as if, on top of that, they don't even care.

Then, like every evening, we were possessed by a great mental confusion: it was impossible to say what part of reality we had gotten ourselves into--a nightmare or just the horribly banal corridor of life we must walk end to end if we wish to reach death.