John > John's Quotes

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“I dreamed about a super computer that could raise anything in existence. First I erased all the spiders. Then I erased all the people, including myself. I wasn’t there anymore, but I could still think and remember, and I wept and wept, wanting to be all the way gone.”
― B.R. Yeager, Negative Space

“I dreamed about a super computer that could erase anything in existence. First I erased all the spiders. Then I erased all the people, including myself. I wasn’t there anymore, but I could still think and remember, and I wept and wept, wanting to be all the way gone.”
― B.R. Yeager, Negative Space

“He told me the planet had nerve endings. Sprawling out toward stars they’d never touch. He told me that when he breathed, the Earth felt it, and when the Earth breathed sometimes he could feel it too. He told me he wished his mother had miscarried.”
― B.R. Yeager, Negative Space

“No matter what happens to you, everyone eventually makes you pretend like everything’s back to normal.”
― B.R. Yeager, Negative Space

“America WAS the edge of the World. A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented. Savages had their waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the other side. But Europe had gone deeper--into obsession, addiction, away from all the savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it. It wasn't Europe's Original Sin--the latest name for that is Modern Analysis--but it happens that Subsequent Sin is harder to account for.
In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But now we have ONLY the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite everything...while Death and Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death only rules here. It has never, in love, become ONE WITH...”
― Thomas Pynchon