Stuff

Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.
~ Roger Zelazny, Prince of Chaos

Humans as described by aliens in Catherynne M. Valente’s Space Opera:
you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them (others) enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don’t have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three. This is not the behavior of a sentient race.

Yeah Baby, tell it!

An aside: after reading Space Opera, I felt I was in MAD love with Valente's writing style. I checked a few other books of hers out of the library BUT, sadly, no joy. I'm sure they're well written, interesting stories but they just didn't rip my socks clean off like Space Opera. I had a sad. Possibly this inability to focus and enjoy, is another side effect of the bullshit, brainjaxing Treasonwesel years.

There's a difference between the fact that the universe is inherently unfair on a cosmic level, and the fact that life is unfair because people are actively making it so.
~ John Scalzi 

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
~ Charles Bukowski

A few from Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
…art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
~ from Wild Dreams of a New Beginning

If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.

My concept of being too open minded? Believing that the vile, intolerant, greedheaded, fraudster hypocrites, who call themselves christian, have any place in a civilized society. They don't and should be banished.

Money doesn't talk, it swears
~ Bob Dylan

Riffing on Sherman Alexie’s quote, “Poetry = Anger x Imagination,” painting is anger/despair/joy/fear/horror/triumph/acquiescence x imagination.

If you're good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can't be wrong.
~ Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.
~ Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 

 We know: An almost certain way to die is to believe you are already dead.
~ David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

A few from William Burroughs:
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.

The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible

And finally, to paraphrase Jack, I have nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.