Oh Well, Oh Well

I promise I'll be just as strong as I can be.

Maybe you can get some sleep tonight.

In the depths

Um, and it's tough because all you want--I think all I ever wanted was for somebody to put their arms around me and say it's okay in spite of the fact that I was screaming and telling them "fuck you, it's not okay," I wanted them to keep their arms around me and just keep saying it's okay, but it's like, why would I want somebody to just let this shit be piled on them? It's like the weirdest feeling. And of course, after--like, you're gonna break anybody's back as long as you're doing that. And so of course I think with all of my previous relationships that obviously became a huge sticking point.

Weightless

Maybe it's not my weekend,
but it's gonna be my year
&I'm so sick of watching the minutes pass as I go nowhere


(this could be all I've waited for)

Eve to Adam

But baby, you'll reach if you just believe it

I know you can reach -- but you've gotta believe.

Betty and Bobby Brown

"Eliza—" I said, "so many of the books I've read to you said that love was the most important thing of all. Maybe I should tell you that I love you now."

"Go ahead," she said.

"I love you, Eliza," I said.

She thought about it. "No," she said at last, "I don't like it."

"Why not?" I said.

"It's as though you were pointing a gun at my head," she said. "It's just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don't mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but 'I love you, too'?"

"You don't love me?" I said.

"What can anybody love about Bobby Brown?"

Timequake

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message:

"I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them.

You are not alone."

Root canals and death

I told Borden what Heller said in an interview when he was asked if he feared death. Heller said he had never experienced a root-canal job. Many people he knew had. From what they told him about it, Heller said, he guessed he, too, could stand one, if he had to. That was how he felt about death, he said.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea.

Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

Slapstick

I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as "common decency." I treated somebody well for a little while, or maybe even a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in turn.

Love need not have had anything to do with it.

. . .

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight,
"Please—a little less love, a little more common decency."

Galapagos

Truth be told, the planet's most victorious organisms have always been microscopic. In all the encounters between Davids and Goliaths, was there ever a time when a Goliath won?

Pyromania

"What is there about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?"

Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. "It's perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It's a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you're a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later.

Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical."

Fahrenheit 451

"So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.

The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth.

Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.

Do you know the legend of Hercules and Antaeus, the giant wrestler, whose strength was incredible so long as he stood firmly on the earth? But when he was held, rootless, in mid-air, by Hercules, he perished easily. If there isn't something  in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane."