jxmah’s Reviews > Notes of a Crocodile > Status Update

"Finding myself at the border of life and death, I followed her echo as it led me toward death."

"I'd prayed for him, and now that he had come, I surrendered, willing to do anything he asked. I wished that he would snatch my soul."

"It was a grown man's howl loosed from a cave at the bottom of the ocean. I had never witnessed such a thing before in my life, nor would I ever forget it. As he abandoned himself to grief, the flood of tears seemed inexhaustible, too much for his body to endure, but even so, his weeping persisted with the courage of conviction."

"When I was twenty, these two entered my orbit, and like every other nebula adrift, soon strayed from its center. Yet they came to represent something very important to me. And what was that? The answer is simple: beauty."

"Our beds would be separated by a wall. I'd sit on my bed and talk to you. You'd sit on your bed, too, and we could talk all day long... That'd be so much fun with no one else around."
"What if we ran out of things to talk about?"
"How can we run out of things to talk about? I'd pound on the wall and say I was tired. Then I'd go to sleep. When you wake up, you automatically have things to talk about again."

"I used to think that I could seek refuge in you. Those two words-seek refuge—were what I really wanted to do. You're the only person at this school I'm close to. It's happened three times now that I've gotten depressed and needed to escape.
Did you know these things? If you don't want me to seek refuge in you, sorry my skin's not thick enough to handle it.
What's wrong with that?"

"How can the world be this cruel? A human being has only so much in them, and yet you must learn through experience, until you finally reach the maddening conclusion that the world wrote you off a long time ago, or accept the prison sentence that your crime is your existence. And the world keeps turning as if nothing had happened."

"Those wrenching eyes, which could lift up the entire skeleton of my being. How I longed for myself to be subsumed into the ocean of her eyes. How the desire, once awakened, would come to scald me at every turn. The strength in those eyes offered a bridge to the outside world. The scarlet mark of sin and my deep-seated fear of abandonment had given way to the ocean's yearning."

"The fact is, most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it's every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world."