comfyquiet

How strange would it be if you met yourself on the street? How strange if you liked yourself, took yourself in your arms, married your own self, propagated by techniques known only to you, and then populated the world? Replicas of you are everywhere. Some are Arabs. Some are Jews. Some live in yurts. It is an abomination, but better that your sweet and scrupulously neat self emerges at many points on the earth to watch the horned moon rise than all those dolts out there, turning into pillars of salt wherever we look. If we have to have people, let them be you, spritzing your geraniums, driving yourself to the haberdashery, killing your supper with a blowgun. Yes, only in the forest do you feel at peace, up in the branches and down in the terrific gorges, but you’ve seen through everything else. You’ve fled in terror across the frozen lake, you’ve found yourself in the sand, the palace, the prison, the dockside stews; and long ago, on this same planet, you came home to an empty house, poured a Scotch-and-soda, and sat in a recliner in the unlit rumpus room, puzzled at what became of you.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit, all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure. So much modern art is the sound of things going out of control. Out of a medium, pushing to its limits and breaking apart.

If you can’t look on the bright side, I will sit with you in the dark

he marveled at how her body fit so perfectly against his: her nose nestled exactly into the hollow between his collarbones; her cheek curved to match the side of his neck. As if they were two halves of a mold. He had studied her with the air of a sculptor, tracing the contours of her hips and calves, his fingertips grazing her skin.

Irony: a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things

— Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them

This is like the end of a movie.

I love you as a friend, I long for you as a lover. But you need space, While I need time. And in between, There is distance.

Comedy is tragedy plus time

how will we understand what it is in human societies that produces violence if we refuse to recognize the humanity of those who commit it?