Pauline Schmidt-West > Pauline's Quotes

“He loved the city most at night. The night hid many of the sorrows. It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to the surface. It was in this dark slipstream that he believed he moved most freely. Behind the cover of shadows. Like a rider in a limousine, he looked out but no one looked in.
There was a random feel to the dark, the quirkiness of chance played out in the blue neon light. So many ways to live. And to die.”
― Michael Connelly, The Black Ice

“... he always carried the feeling that he was struggling toward some kind of resolution and knowledge of purpose. That there was something good in him or about him. It was the waiting that was so hard. The waiting often left a hollow feeling in his soul. And he believed people could see this, that they knew when they looked at him that he was empty.”
― Michael Connelly, The Black Ice

“one of the crazies moved into the cone of light beneath a streetlight. It was a black man, high-stepping and making jerking movements with his arms. He made a crisp turn and began moving back into the darkness. He was a trombone player in a matching band in a world somewhere else.”
― Michael Connelly, The Black Ice

“Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

“Wilderness. The word itself is music.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful. (p 41)”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Of all the featherless beasts, only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. Much to learn.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“So I lived alone.
The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“For the lady’s husband to become actively jealous was considered both doltish and dishonorable, a breach of the spirit of courtesy. Yet the record suggests that this was a fairly common occurrence and one of the occupational hazards of being a troubadour. The most famous crime passionnel of the epoch was the murder of Guilhem de Cabestanh, a troubadour knight whose love for the Lady Seremonda aroused the jealousy of her husband, Raimon de Castel-Roussillon. The story goes that Raimon killed Guilhem while he was out hunting, removed the heart from the body, and had it served to his wife for dinner, cooked and seasoned with pepper. Then comes the great confrontation:
“And when the lady had eaten of it, RAimon de Castel-Roussillon said unto her: “Know you of what you have eaten?’ And she said, ‘I know not, save that the taste thereof is good and savoury.’ Then he said to her that that she had eaten of was in very truth the head of SIr Guilhem of Cabestanh, and caused the head to be brought before her, that she might the more readily believe it. And when the lady had seen and heard this, she straightway fell into a swoon, and when she was recovered of it, she spake and said: “Of a truth, my Lord, such good meat have you given me that never more will I eat of other.”
THen he, hearing this, ran upon her with his sword and would have struck at her head, but the lady ran to a balcony, and cast herself down, and so died.”
...the story is probably apocryphal… grisly details...borrowed from an ancient legend...the Middle Ages believed it and drew the intended moral conclusion-that husbands should leave well enough alone. Raimon was held up to scorn while Guilhem became one of the great heroes of the troubadour epoch.”
― Horizon Magazine, Summer 1970

“At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman's sex.
In my case - and, I believe, in the case of Chris McCandless - that was a very different thing from wanting to die.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“We all agree it's too big to keep up with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it, so we center it all in by swigging Scotch from the bottle and when it's empty I run out of the car and buy another one, period.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

“Do not eat of this world,
she warned as I left,
unless you are willing to suffer.”
― Justen Ahren

“Night

Night came, sirens.
Dark and breathless, it came
with the limp shape of my mother in its arms./
In its white coat, it came with her from the bath/
laid her on the floor in the hall./
It struck her blue mouth
forced the metal of its own mouth over the water of hers./
It blew into her again
and again. It said, Stay.
It asked her name.

Morning came.
Tender it came
as tender as the one before.
It brought walls
and the doors of the house stood swinging open and closing upon our secrets/
for everyone to see. For days,
I slept with the words
I'd heard her singing in the tub
Hello, darkness.”
― Justen Ahren, A Strange Catechism

“The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”
― Donald Barthelme, Come Back, Dr. Caligari

“Write about what you're afraid of.”
― Donald Barthelme

“The death of God left the angels in a strange position.”
― Donald Barthelme

“See the moon? It hates us.”
― Donald Barthelme

“There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.”
― Donald Barthelme

“And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.”
― Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

“The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.”
― Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

“I have to admit we are locked in the most exquisite mysterious muck. This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor. To describe it takes many hundreds of thousands of words. Our muck is only a part of a much greater muck -- the nation-state -- which is itself the creation of that muck of mucks, human consciousness. Of course all these things also have a touch of sublimity -- as when Moonbelly sings, for example, or all the lights go out. What a happy time that was, when all the electricity went away! If only we could re-create that paradise! By, for instance, all forgetting to pay our electric bills at the same time. All nine million of us. Then we'd all get those little notices that say unless we remit within five days the lights will go out. We all stand up from our chairs with the notice in ours hands. The same thought drifts across the furrowed surface of nine million minds. We wink at each other, through the walls.”
― Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

“Little is known about her. We are assured, however, that the same damnable involvements that obsess us obsess her too. Copulation. Strangeness. Applause.”
― Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

“Dun-colored fathers tend to shy at obstacles, and therefore you do not want a father of this color, because life, in one sense, is nothing but obstacles, and his continual shying will reduce your nerves to grease.”
― Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

“Vivian had found trouble early and often, and discovered that instead of it scaring her, it only made her feel more alive.”
― Michael Callahan, Searching for Grace Kelly

“A bit early to put all the chips in the fryer just yet. Why don't you just wait and see? Remember: There's a reason the Fairy godmother gave Cinderella two glass slippers.”
― Michael Callahan, Searching for Grace Kelly

“..allegation[s] of flirting dripping from his lips like drops from a leaky faucet.”
― Michael Callahan, Searching for Grace Kelly

“They'd lived their lives on tightropes, never knowing where the next paycheck was coming from or if one was coming at all, their personal lives a mishmash of backstage affairs and dressing room brawls endured for the brief heady adrenaline rush brought by the orchestra's overture and glare of white lights.”
― Michael Callahan, Searching for Grace Kelly