quote mania
Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
–Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image by Steve R. Cupp
the inner room
into the wooded hallows of an aged workroom
recent additions
 | Ryan Eberly on 12.11.08 |
the inner room 
A glass of milk isn’t just a nice drink with chocolate chip cookies. It’s cows forced to stay pregnant and pumped with hormones. It’s the inevitable calves that live a few miserable months, squeezed in veal boxes. A pork chop means a pig, stabbed and bleeding, with a snare around one foot, being hung up to die screaming as it’s sectioned into chops and roasts and lard. Even a hard-boiled egg is a hen with her feet crippled from living in a battery cage only four inches wide, so narrow she can’t raise her wings, so maddening her beak is cut off so she won’t attack the hens trapped on each side of her. With her feathers rubbed off by the cage and her beak cut, she lays egg after egg until her bones are so depleted of calcium that they shatter at the slaughterhouse.
This is the chicken in chicken noodle soup, the laying hens, the hens so bruised and scarred that they have to be shredded and cooked because nobody would ever buy them in a butcher’s case. This is the chicken in corn dogs. Chicken nuggets.
-Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
Waiters will always pee in the soup. People will always fall in love.
–Fight Club
When we sleep with each other, we sleep with images we’ve absorbed and, without knowing it, those our lovers have absorbed as well. Like fast food, images of other people’s orgasms, stripped of context and connection, are available 24 hours a day and consumed alone and on the cheap… When a woman lies down with a man, a light show of images plays over her body without her knowing it: red-satin garter belts, perhaps, or beaver shots or Marilyn Chambers or Monica Lewinsky or the Penthouse Pet of the Month. When a man lies down with a woman, images of imaginary men play over his face without his knowing it–the hero of Tristan and Iseult, perhaps, or a Tammy Wynette song or a romance novel. No wonder we feel split within ourselves and from each other. We expect sexualized romantic love to carry a greater psychological burden than does any other culture on earth while we simultaneously denigrate the sexual. And so we reverberate between sexual obsession and sexual shame.
-Katy Butler, “Satori in the Bedroom”
If you were happy every moment of your life, you wouldn’t be a human being, you’d be a gameshow host.
–Heathers
no estimate is more in danger of erroneous calculations than those by which a man computes the force of his own genius
-samuel johnson
Would Make Our Jobs a Lot Harder
Woman stuck in bathroom, kicking and banging: Help me! [Inaudible yelling in Spanish.]
Conductor: Miss, don’t push the door, slide the door!
Man: Some people just shouldn’t be allowed on the train.
When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
-Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
When Vulcan’s fires fail to satisfy Venus she proceeds to Mars: the heat of lust, that is, boils over into cruelty.
~ Guibert, A Monk’s Confession, 3.3
In the private rooms of restaurants, where one dines after midnight by the light of wax candles, the colorful crowd of writers and actresses held sway. They were prodigal as kings, full of ambitious ideals and fantastic frenzies. They lived far above all others, among the storms that rage between heaven and hell, partaking of the sublime. As for the rest of the world, it was lost, with no particular place, and as if non-existent.
~ Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Part One, IX
and for the four-year-old girl found dead in a dumpster shot by her mother, her eulogy, the sound of construction through head-to-head traffic, today is just another day
~ Tom Gabel, Against Me!, Armageddon
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
You’ll have to forgive me. I’m a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep. Weeping is what it is, not crying. I sit in this chair and ooze like a sponge.
-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
“give jonny some soup, all will be better.”
~ for Margie 10.21.07
If drug use were to be viewed primarily as the medical problem it is, we would have more resources for preventing and treating drug addiction instead of spending most of our money criminalizing use, which had had virtually no effect at all.
~ Jocelyn Elders (via maegana, thanks!)
It must be white, a picture of health, the spongy napkin made to blot blood. Dainty paper soaks up leaks that steaks splayed on trays are oozing. Lights replace the blush red flesh is losing. Cutlets leak. Tenderloins bleed pink light. Plastic wrap bandages marbled slabs in sanitary packaging made to be stained. A three-hanky picture of feminine hygiene.
-Harryette Mullen, S*PeRM**K*T
we’re constantly trying to identify a moment of stillness…
I felt that I somehow belonged here, I really did, but I could have been in Congo for how unfamiliar it felt. Staying in a colored house with colored women, eating off their dishes, lying on their sheets–-it was not something I was against, but I was brand-new to it, and my skin had never felt so white to me.
-Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time–
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew in Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luft waffe, your gobbledygoo,
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You–
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two–
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Sylvia Plath, Daddy
“ah…dinnertime…the perfect break between work and drunk”
-homer simpson
It’s often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, “Stay there. Don’t move.”
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“the pleasure of the text is our law”
~Barthes
“one poem or three minutes. if you mess with that haiku shit, you’re done.”
~open mic anon.
Sadness and loneliness aren’t destinations. They’re roads that lead us away from everything we once loved.
Andy Greenwald, Miss Misery
I watched you all succeed
with the highest marks in greed.
Say Anything, Chia-like, I Shall Grow Lyrics
“don’t bite the hand that gets you off” -e.
These bustling streets are icy veins of a beast who snuffs her prayer;
Her bones and the truth show through.
Eve6, Hey Montana
After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge. (Henry Miller)
these are all great author’s writers hidden mystery where they buried their chemistry and philosophy together in this cimetry thats where brave ppl are always in the unconcious ppl survive..