Kindle Notes & Highlights
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
My heart is an empty refrigerator.
“You look like shit.” “Thanks. I look way better than I feel.”
‘One fire burns out another’s burning’
“Don’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.” - W. Somerset Maugham
Time itself is a gift-curse. Time says: ‘Look here! Here is a precious moment to do something with!’ Then as soon as you try to grasp the moment, it’s gone. And you haven’t done anything. And while you’re thinking about that, there is another moment, and then it too is gone. Cruel, like an eternal game of pass-the-parcel.
“We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the whole universe.” - Upanishads
Like Gatsby, I’m a fraud. My whole life has been engineered, contrived. So much so that I don’t really know who I am or who I was or who I’m meant to be. In moments of melancholy I see visions of myself floating upside down in my pool, an island to ruby water. There are worse ways to go, I assure myself, there are worse ways to go.
you’re stuck because you’re not giving enough, not putting enough of yourself out there.”
“You’re a taker. And you’ve been taking for a long time. And I think that you can only take so much from the universe before it closes shop.”
What would Warhol be without his paranoia, Hunter S. Thompson without his Quaaludes, Johnny Cash without his philandering? We Somebodies are not expected to walk the line.
Maybe that’s why God made childbirth so painful, so that when your life is wrecked by children you know it could be worse.
“The advantage of emotions is that they lead us astray.” - Oscar Wilde
It’s not pretty to be paranoid, but paranoid people live longer,
I feel like Abraham in Genesis, offering up my child to be burnt as a sacrifice. Or an island savage, keen to appease the gods, strong-arming a virgin into the liquid blaze of a volcano. Not wanting to, God knows, but knowing what has to be done.
Only people who have been broken will know this feeling: that nothing matters anymore. It’s when things get so bad that you resign yourself to never being happy again, to living a sham of a life. It’s like having a permanent subtitle stamped on your vision: Nothing Matters. It’s there when you close your eyes to go to sleep at night and it’s there the next morning when you wake up, before you have time to think that this day will be better. It’s especially apparent when you are brushing your teeth or trying to summon the energy to lift your arms to wash your hair in the shower. Apart from the
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There should be an emotional statute of limitations when it comes to loving someone who leaves you. After five years there should be a cutting of that black umbilical cord; a cool sharp snip and your sadness and longing should disappear.
Maybe this painful twisting inside of me is part of some kind of genesis, and I am going to emerge as a better version of myself. It’s an optimistic thought. It helps to believe in something.
explicate some thematic concepts or symbolism that I completely missed when I was writing it. I find it interesting that a novel is a different story to each person who reads it. It’s also different to the same reader, at different points in his life. As if the words are living, breathing. I’ve read somewhere that, à la Heraclitus, you can never step into the same novel twice. There is sorcery in the words.
I feel as though I am coming back to life, but it is a different life. I feel as if I have stopped chasing whatever it was that I was chasing. Not because I found what I was looking for but because I have given up. I see with absolute clarity that life is, ultimately, pointless, and this knowledge makes me feel like I am drowning. Not fighting the current that takes my warmth and my air but instead, letting it pull me down. I no longer feel the need to travel, to find people’s secrets, to risk my safety. Day to day is dull.
psychological vacuum
every puppet master has his puppet master.
people play with other peoples’ lives but in the end the universe has the final say.
“Sometimes getting lost is part of finding your way.”
