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"We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves."

— Robert R. McCammon(Boy's Life)

"Well, we've had some fun, we've shared some stories, and now you know how to make a kite out of a porcupine -- no, wait, wrong book.

Anyway, if you're so inclined, give internet dating a shot. It's fun, it's annoying, it's addictive, it's time-consuming, it's good, it's bad, it's messy, it's delicious.

Just like life...."

"I enjoyed this scene; and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory of the past, and the anticipation of the future. I was formed for peaceful happiness. During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind; and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature, or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man, could always interest my heart, and communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit, what I shall soon cease to be -- a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others, and intolerable to myself."

Frankenstein

by

Mary Shelley

"The world has no existence whatsover outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha,and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living."


Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
an inquiry into values

Robert M. Pirsig

"Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings, but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful."

-H.P. Lovecraft(The Call of Cthulhu)

"They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls."

H.P. Lovecraft(The Rats in the Walls)

"Except I think it feels more like an empty stomach than a broken heart. An aching hollowness that food can't cure. You know. You've felt it yourself, I bet. You hurt all the time, you're restless, you can't think straight, you sort of wish you were dead but what you really want is for everything to be the same as it was when you were still with her.. or him"

— Richard Laymon (Night in the Lonesome October)

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.



The Art of Fiction - Henry James

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.



Texts and Pretexts - Aldous Huxley