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Apr 14

I found an old copy of Our Mutual Friend I read in AP English about 5 years ago…

I was looking around everything I underlined and everything I wrote between the lines and in the margins and I had circled these two paragraphs about 20 times:

” Over and over again. No. No. But try over and over again, nevertheless. See! A token of life! An indubitable token of life! The spark may smoulder and go out, or it may glow and expand, but see! The four rough fellows, seeing, shed tears. Neither Riderhood in this world, nor Riderhood in the other, could draw tears from them; but a striving human soul between the two can do it easily.

He is struggling to come back. Now, he is almost here, now he is far away again. Now he is struggling harder to get back. And yet- like us all, when we swoon - like us all, every day of our lives when we wake - he is instinctively unwilling to be restored to the consciousness of existence, and would be left dormant, if he could.”

Sep 17

-Charles Baudelaire

May 2

“He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence.” Jack Kerouac from On the Road

“Something curiously unsympathetic and cold between them was really a form of humor by which they communicated their own set of subtle vibrations.” Jack Kerouac from On the Road

Feb 9

“God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!” “See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.” And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night.” Kurt Vonnegut in “Cat’s Cradle”

Jun 9

“If the mental prowess of kings and commanders were as effective in peace as in war, human affairs would be conducted more uniformly and consistently, and you would not see things swept along in different directions and everything changing and confused.” -Sallust from “Catiline’s War.”

I’ve posted this before, but I love it so much i’m posting it again.

“They itemized what the savagery of war was like, what befell the conquered: maidens and boys seized, children wrenched from their parents’ embrace, the mothers of families enduring whatever their conquerers pleased, shrines and homes despoiled, slaughter and burning, and, finally, everywhere filled with arms, corpses, gore and grief.” -Sallust “Catiline’s War.