Matthew Mousseau > Matthew's Quotes

“Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“My Name

“I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.
If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was raining very hard.
That is my name.
Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong—“Sorry for the mistake,”—and you had to do something else.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was a game you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting in a chair near the window.
That is my name.
Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.
That is my name.
Perhaps you stared into a river. There as something near you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.
That is my name.”
― Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar

“I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.”
― Philip Larkin

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.”
― Socrates

“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.”
― Emma Goldman

“This nothingness into which the West is sliding is not the natural end, the dying, the sinking of a flourishing community of peoples. Instead, it is again a specifically Western nothingness: a nothingness that is rebellious, violent, anti-God, and antihuman. Breaking away from all that is established, it is the utmost manifestation of all the forcesopposed to God. It is nothingness as God; no one knows its goal or its measure. Its rule is absolute. It is a creative nothingness[113] that blows its anti-God breath into all that exists, creates the illusion of waking it to new life, and at the same time sucks out its true essence[114] until it soon disintegrates into an empty husk and is discarded. Life, history, family, people, language, faith—the list could go on forever because nothingness spares nothing—all fall victim to nothingness.[115]”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
― William Gibson, Count Zero

“Black has depth.. you can go into it.. And you start seeing what you're afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.”
― David Lynch, Lynch on Lynch