Intentional Dissonance Quotes

“Never apologize for how you feel. No one can control how they feel. The sun doesn’t apologize for being the sun. The rain doesn’t say sorry for falling. Feelings just are”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“She reminds him of every good day he's ever had. Every summer spent in fields of grass. Every sunrise. Every sunset. She tastes like dew and smells like light. And when she speaks, it's like someone slowly plucking the strings of a guitar, a sadly beautiful song starting to play, all his own. And he loves her.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“You must remember this feeling, Jon.
The feeling of being happy. It doesn't happen often but when it does, you must grab it with both hands and hold it close. Let it overwhelm you. Don't
over analyse any emotion. But remember it. Always remember it.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“This is why it hurts the way it hurts.
You have too many words in your head. There are too many ways to describe the way you feel. You will never have the luxury of a dull ache.
You must suffer through the intricacy of feeling too much”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“Booze makes you stupid and like it. It makes you fall around and not care. And eventually, stupid is the only way you know how to be. Cocaine makes you feel important, that life matters, that you matter. That the music is better than it really is. That every conversation
is profound and that all pretenses have been stripped away. Ecstasy makes you dance all night and love your friends so much, in a way that you've never been able to tell them about before. Acid makes you see pretty colours and makes things breathe. But Sadness, there is nothing like Sadness.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“A man becomes his thoughts and these are now yours.”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“And he loves her. He loves her like he can never grab enough of her between his fingers”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“Awe.

It’s a feeling he misses. He made lists of things he wanted to feel when he was younger, big things, small things, ice, snow, the sand at the beach, someone else’s hands holding his, feeling him feeling them, a feedback loop of feelings, which is what happens when two people make love. He wanted to feel things that made him feel safe and scared and things that ripped his heart out of his chest, things that made him want to go home and things that made him want to travel, things that made him proud and things that made him regret his choices and he, like all people, slowly ticked these things off the list in his head as he lived, as the world turned until soon, there were very few things left to feel.

He believed the last thing he would feel, would be nothing, as that was nearly impossible to feel unless you were dead or hadn’t been born yet. He wondered what it’d be like to not be able to wonder.

He’d once wanted to know what it felt like to be able to talk to people properly, to be normal but he’d given up on finding that feeling, figuring no one ever really found it.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“She was real to me. And while I can be logical about this, logic has never once mended a broken heart or fixed a sundered soul. She has poisoned the very core of me. A dream has killed me”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“A plane flies overhead and inside it is a writer who has spent most of his life as a law clerk, even though he’s always known deep down that he’s a writer. For the first time, he’s worked out what he wants to write, what the truth really is. He begs a napkin and a pen off the air hostess and he writes down the most beautiful sentence ever written, as the engine catches fire outside and the plane starts its plummet to the ground. It doesn’t matter to him. It’s the only sentence he’s ever written and it is the last and no part of him cares. The sentence falls through the air with singed, black edges and comes to rest in a tree, in a park, miles away. One day, around ten years from now, an old widow of an astronaut will find it when a strong breeze finally blows it from its hiding place. She will read it and she will weep.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“Too many people mistook envy for happiness. They believed other people wanting to do the things they were doing was more important than doing things they wanted to do. So they'd edit their photographs and edit their lives and edit and lie until from a distance, it looked like they had the perfect life. But life isn't something that should be edited. Life shouldn't be cut. The only way you'll ever discover what it truly means to be alive and human is by sharing the full experience of what it means to be human and each blemish and freckle that comes with it.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“The drug, the Sadness, is working, breaking the horrible, dull, boring, mind-numbing happiness imposed on him and everyone else in NewLand by the antidepressants in the city's water supply.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“A man looks down at the red paint on his hands and wonders for a moment if he’s killed his wife and this is her blood or maybe he’s just painted the garden bench red, that’s all. He thinks it is a strange thought and carries on digging the hole he’s digging in the back garden. He whistles. He writes this all down in his moleskin diary, later that evening. His wife should be back from work by now but she isn’t.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“Elsewhere are two letters that were never sent, because of pride, each a declaration of love that would’ve changed lives”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“Perhaps. Perhaps that's why you drink wine and take drugs. Because you want to kill the question.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“Because you’ve made sadness a disease….Happiness without sadness is emptiness, nothingness. The world once taught us to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ when we still cried, as if what we were doing was something to be ashamed of. What you’ve done is worse.”
“I want you to be happy. The world wants you to be happy.”
“…Then why does it have to get so goddamn angry at me, when I’m not?”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“What about artists who aren’t nice people? They’re just nice people who cared too much for a person or a world that hurt them too much. So now they chase the world and people away.”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“ We all have our routines' , he said softly. " But they must have a purpose and provide an outsome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all" .”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“There was only the kind of silence that comes when someone takes away a cloclk to be repaired and after a time you become aware of its absence because its gentle, reassuring tick is gone.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“There’s a boiling pot of paranoia in the pit of his stomach. That slow, heavy weight he always has when he leaves the house, when he’s in the open and he’s carrying something, even if it’s just one vial of Sadness. He feels vulnerable. He knows if they stop him or the train, they’ll search everyone and give all of them a hard time.
He just wants to get home without trouble. That’s all he’s ever wanted. To ignore the rest of the world, enjoy the Sadness [...]”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“History is a series of difficult choices. The only reason there’s anything left of the human race, the only reason we’re still here is because men like me made those difficult choices”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“What follows is what happens each time I fall. I do not know if these things really happen but this is what I believe happens. As your eyes move across these words, some sacred engine is coming back to life and I am beginning to fall again. Sometimes, it feels like I’m floating”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“On a distant battlefield, somewhere in the Middle East, Sergeant Jackson is sick of this fucking war and stands up from behind the trench he’s hiding in, ignores the pleas of his squad mates to get down and starts to play the electric guitar he’s insisted he bring into battle with him. He plays a song: his father’s favourite. He’s spent years learning it and he thinks it’s beautiful. The first bullet kills him. Someone takes a picture as he falls. A dying soldier clutching his electric guitar.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“The flag given to the son of a soldier.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance

“He’s been absent-mindedly playing with his father’s brass pocket watch, turning it over and over in his hands, feeling the engraving with his fingers: You will become whatever you want to become.”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“Great. A political tree with a penchant for rabble rousing.”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“How is a pamphlet worse than a riot?” “Because words are forever. Even if you kill the person who writes them, words are forever. Even if you disagree with them and spend the rest of your days arguing against what was said, what was said was still said. A riot only lasts as long as it takes for a fire to burn itself out.”
― pleasefindthis, Intentional Dissonance: A Book About Falling