Michael > Recent Status Updates

“The giggling out in the hallway. That demonic giggling at the library. Even when I concentrate, I’m still not able to tell if the sound is inside or outside my head. It’s like looking at one of those toy pictures that yield 2 distinct scenes when tilted this way or that, but, at a certain angle, form only a merging blur of both. Nonetheless, the laughing is there, somewhere. And the voice is so familiar.”

“A finger plucked and a string vibrated at a certain melodic pitch, while a stick hit a skin and a sound was made that formed a beat. But what the computer was to bring was the moment when a single piece of notation, a single clicked computer moment, would contain both rhythm and melody. That was the possibility, that was the new. That’s what was being sought in… New Order’s rehearsal room.”

“The musicians own everything, the company owns nothing.
All our bands have the freedom to fuck off.”

“‘Excuse me, sir, I have a rather important request. For you, sir, for Granada to put on a rather controversial band called the Sex Pistols.’
‘What exactly is a Sex Pistol?’ replied the old gentleman.
‘The BBC banned them, sir, town councils have banned them, bloody British Rail have banned them, sir. This is Manchester, I believe we do things differently here.’”

“There’s another world that parallels our own, and to a certain degree you’re able to step into that other world and come back safely. As long as you’re careful. But go past a certain point and you’ll lose the path out.”

“Say the wind blows. It can be a strong, violent wind or a gentle breeze. But eventually every kind of wind dies out and disappears. Wind doesn’t have form. It’s just a movement of air. You should listen carefully, and then you’ll understand the metaphor.

“You’re in a strange position all right. You’re in love with a girl who is no more, jealous of a boy who’s gone for ever. Even so, this emotion you’re feeling is more real, and more intensely painful, than anything you’ve ever felt before. And there’s… No possibility of finding an escape. You’ve wandered into a labyrinth of time, and the biggest problem of all is that you have no desire to get out.

“Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward any more. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”

“The land here is being carelessly killed. Children are playing around the church. During the night I was very cold. An old man crosses the bridge, unaware that he’s being watched. He walks so slowly, and ponderously, pausing again and again after short, hesitant steps; that is Death walking with him. All is shrouded still in semi-darkness.”

“On my fifteenth birthday I’ll run away from home, journey to a far-off town and live in a corner of a small library. It’d take a week to go into the whole thing, all the details. So I’ll just give the main point. [b]On my fifteenth birthday I’ll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library.[/b]

“I’ve probably made several wrong decisions in a row concerning my route and, in hindsight, this has led me to the right course. What’s really bad is that after acknowledging a wrong decision, I don’t have the nerve to turn back, since I’d rather correct myself with another wrong decision. But I’m following a direct imaginary line, anyway, … and so the detours are not very great…”

“If we are to learn anything from this tragic event, we must look at what happened all over again,… Something tells me things will only get worse if we don’t wash it out of our metabolism. It’s all too easy to say ‘Aum was evil’ … Yet the spell cast by these phrases is almost impossible to break, the whole emotionally charged ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ vocabulay has been done to death.”

“What I find really scary, though, is the media. Especially television, it’s so limited as to what it shows. And when that gets out, it really makes people biased, and creates an illusion that the tiny detail they focus on is the whole picture.”

“I went back to work on 10 May, and from that very first day I took the exact same 7.15 Hibiya Line train that had been targeted in the gas attack. I even made sure I sat in the same carriage - the same seat. Once the train passed Kamiyacho, I looked over my shoulder and said to myself, ‘That’s where it happened.’ At that moment I felt a bit queasy, but having got it over and done with, my spirits lifted.”

“You get up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, and head for the subway station. You board the train, crowded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a perfectly run-of-the-mill day. Until five men in disguise poke at the floor of the carriage with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas, puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid…”

“One solitary, overriding thought: get away from here. People frighten me. Our Eisner mustn’t die, she will not die, I won’t permit it. She is not dying now because she isn’t dying. Not now, no, she is not allowed to. My steps are firm. And now the earth trembles. When I move, a buffalo moves. When I rest, a mountain reposes.”

“You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you — that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else.”

“For the last several days, the slaughter had been going more slowly; the great herd after more than three weeks, seemed to have begun to realize the presence of their killers and to have started dumbly to prepare against them; they began to break up into a number of very small herds;… the herd of some five thousand animals was now less than three hundred.”

“A blackness moved on the valley, below the dark pines that grew on the opposite mountain. Andrews strained his eyes; at the edges of the patch, there was a slight ripple; and then the patch itself throbbed like a great body of water moved by obscure currents. The patch, though it appeared small at this distance, was… more than a mile in length and nearly a half mile in width.
‘Buffalo,’ Miller whispered.”

“He felt that wherever he lived, and wherever he would live hereafter, he was leaving the city more and more, withdrawing into the wilderness. He felt that that was the central meaning he could find in all his life, and it seemed to him then that all the events of his childhood and his youth had led him unknowingly to this moment upon which he poised, as if before flight.”

“You are a beautiful person, Doctor. Clear-headed. Strong. But you seem always to be dragging your heart along the ground. From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.”

“This was not just a separation. Even if the war was over and we left for Earth only a few minutes apart, in different ships, the geometry of the collapsar jump would pile up years between us. When the second one arrived on Earth, his partner would probably be a half-century older; more probably dead.”

“[T]he enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional — more taxes but more jobs as well. After 22 years, only 27 returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war… was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.”