A Laugh in the Spoke Quotes

“Getting high only made me think of you more.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Another dead thing to haunt me in the night. And we will holler at lifeless crescent moons never begging for air or freedom. A flickering of a candle whose wick will not burn out as much as it will be extinguished by being drowned out. A wolf without teeth, howling his desires to unburden his soul.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“I think I finally understand what it is that you experienced in our last moments together. The fear to resign yourself to a final belief greater than yourself. It is difficult to decide what cause to believe in because of the fear that it is a lesser unworthy cause, it is not the meaning but rather a symptom of looking for meaning. And in all of our attachments we long for them to have meaning no matter how long they last. It is a scary thing to create such a drastic action that changes your life. It requires more than faith, there will be a second where only the action and what Kierkegaard called the infinite movement would have to occur. The final dance.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“I lay there. Lay there. The places we call home, are never remembered on a map. And all manic episodes start with a thought.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“People spend time trying to impress people through the things they do and say in a tone any louder than a gasped whisper. The mass commodification of cool is perverse in the sense that the individual defining the term has its basis in what they think others will idolise in their own individuality. If there was no ego there would be no cool. If there was no cool, people would see more beauty. They would stop seeing their lives as more important than others based on what they themselves value”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Degrading to atoms, conscious or not. The world was always and never falling apart.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Nature, or the natural, that is what we find beauty in. The idea that some idea belongs in part of an order. That it is more than coincidence or a strange occurrence or a singular moment but rather that it is a coincidence or a strange occurrence or a singular moment that is natural to our being is what makes it beautiful. As if being anywhere else but where we are would be wrong, a pale version of the beauty our hearts imagined.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“It was in Kuala Lumpur that I saw the tree roots at the botanical gardens grow as much outside of the ground as inside. I saw what used to be the tallest building in the world still appreciated for its beauty long after it lost its title. I thought people could be like buildings, still adored despite their best years behind them. I heard the horns of cars drown out the sound of fountains spurting illuminated shades of violet and crashing against themselves and I thought it was time to leave, to head home the same way I left it; expecting things to be a different way than how they actually will work out. The actions of ones life, makes his life, and in this way things can disappear but never leave. A person that sees beauty in only the grand has never witnessed true beauty, if the abyss is to remind us of anything it is that there is beauty in nothingness and everything. The forest that has no trees, no stones, no path and no flowers is still a forest because of the feeling one can get walking through it which leaves me wondering if the grand zero is everything, that reality was a moment in which I both existed and ceased to exist.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“The night sky should not be scary, it should always be beautiful. I imagine my marriage will be like this and that of the void, that I will love my wife when she dies and that it will love me back long after mine. The blank night sky faces me, with my back flattened out by another blackness.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“The abyss is black and eventually I know I will smile, laugh even knowing all I think I know, maniacally while I howl at anything I could see that would laugh, snarl and howl the way I do.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Most of the conversation was said with our eyes. Our eyes told truths neither of us could understand. Her a Goddess and me her pew. It was spent with me looking at her and her looking elsewhere. Perpendicular.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Two insane idiots with the same idea, that is what love is.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“The thing about leaving home, that self proclaimed exile, is that you love it even more if it is that bird that sings you the answer when you visit it after being gone for extended periods of time. The longer you are away the more you will think about going back. If only for your eyes to weep at the changes.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“They said let go, so I tried, knowing that I have never been able to let go of anything that was already attached to my brain. Like all the other moments where I was happy, I realised, all I wanted was more time. I wanted to be stuck, to stagnate, let me be the rock that drowns, let this be my future. I have seen uninhabited islands of anonymous colours as high as the clouds they lay on just to think of you, repeating itself like a parakeet or a perfectly broken loop traveling the world to find its and our spiritual oblivion. People only stay in your life depending on how much you persist with them.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“The thing about death is that it comes. Even the cleanest of deaths can leave remorse. The duality of it is dealing and understanding when it is a loved one, we have to derive a meaning from it at least personally. We define ourselves with the way we let go of our loved ones. The duality of it is that this ultimate loved one for you can die and the fact that it did not mean anything more in the grand scheme of things than how it effects you those around you. Some egoists have this belief that one death is more tragic than another, this is most easily represented when a celebrity dies and the news on everyones personal flat-screen holographic television displays it throughout the day. The importance of life is erased in death. It is the polar opposite, it is the abyss of nothings what some hipsters call the void, there is nothing more tragic than it ceased to exist in any circumstance we as the atomic beings decide to view it as. Maybe there is no way of knowing what is more tragic, watching life escape a person you loved or not being able to say goodbye.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Something I learned when I got older; your actions have a permanence. Delineations from the perfect line. Some mistakes can last a lifetime like the first brush of death. Some beliefs are worth tearing fabric for like perfect lines. It does not matter where a person has been but what they have done. There are people that can still be shallow no matter how much they travel or what they see.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Ecce homo means behold the man. Behold the man and all his failures, if you can love him then God has forgiven and I have finally found a God worth serving with thin thighs and knots in her back. We have never kissed underneath a tree, I have never pushed your hair aside to shield the wind, I have never said whatever forces unseen and seen should be ours to smile eyes closed together. Buildings laugh at each other the way we do.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“So I drink just one more glass to get me through the night; I look at my lamp, my fan, all the pictures and posted on my wall and I know I have failed again. I have left things left unsaid, undone, unseen. With only my dreams to guide me. If I knew my greatest sins were behind me, and not only something I felt, I would feel safe alone in my flawed arms, hoping to touch something purer and lovelier than me, so I think of you. I know what hopes are left to you, I know what pressure they bring and I still feel them because if anything hopes are wasteless. They are the infinite until we become the finite. I know I should not be scared of them, I know that they could be false, but dreams themselves are only false when the individual is false. I am false. I am hope. I am all the things I wish I could be but never see. So I see you, beautiful, long black hair, I say: God let this all be for something. And you sit there with your brown questioning eyes, you smile and I think again: God let this all be for something.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Close your eyes, what do you think about? Not all dreams happen with your eyes closed, but the ones that do are the ones that have the most imagery, the most hope. Hope can be a dreadful thing but it can be a beautiful thing. There have been many great philosophers who have said that hope and dreams have this false sense of themselves, that they are only fragments of the real or true. They may be right about being fragments, but that does not make them any less true. Dreams send us guiding towards ideas, that are true themselves, if only ideals, of goals that we should strive towards. It is cliche and commonplace to call dreams fantasies of the mind, wishful thinking of fading things. Yet there are things that philosophers cannot explain, that reason leaves, all philosophers believe themselves poets but leave the soul out of their writing. The mind and its reason, that is truth. That is the belief. Yet anyone who has looked at a view that has left them without breath has known of something more.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Kings and Queens were once the rulers of lands, they did this under the supervision of God, their own rule was sanctioned by the divine right they were granted under these Gods. They themselves alone concluded that their lineage was supported by supremacy over others. By this they ruled over all people. Those who believed their stories. The Church supported the rulers who further established their respective religions. And so humans dared to dream and killed their Gods by killing their royalty. Exile was not enough, the only way their subservience would be eliminated was to murder without righteousness or virtue. If the apple is the symbol of knowledge then God wanted us to stay ignorant in order not to die itself.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“I looked outside your second floor living room window. I saw a view I had never thought I would see. There were trees of reddish brown hugging a river, dying but beautiful. Telling me I was so much more than a moment, and yet only a moment could define me at the present time. The future is unseen. Expecting to be better, is not always the truth. It takes something to smash your brains in, to squeeze your heart, to torture your soul in order to make you see what is in front of you”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“I have felt your drool on me
And never loved you more
Then with your closed eyes
Telling my shirt that home was not full of sights
But only full of soul.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“I want to be your lighthouse
No matter how many dreams change
I want to be built upon rock
Weathered by storms
Smoothed out by the sea
With jagged edges only you know”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“It is funny to think our perceptions of the world change second to second as we continue to experience more of it. And that everyone is creating their own meaning and purpose with every second that they experience. It seems impossible not to get caught up, or lost, in those moments of constantly change and we as imperfect beings surely interpret our reality in false ways because no one can know the actual truth of the world only their perception of it. The actual truth of what is best for them is always an idea. The people that say that they live in the moment, as most people do, are often forgetting that the moment in the present should be used to progress. Successes and failures are only understood in moments in the future, based on the present, during moments of clarity in retrospect. For this reason, I think its important to forgive people in order to give ourselves freedom.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“It is a dangerous thing to go back searching to your past. All things grow, that means all things change. Two parallel lines do not meet, unless in infinity. The past would always feel different experienced in the present. What if the fond memories go away if you live in them for a little while. Maybe I am going in circles cause it could go either way. Now orbits, orbits are different. Gravitational pull is at play. And if Newton’s laws are taken into account the only way to create an orbit is to have a force that pushes you into motion, but also pushes you at a distance where another orbit is able to push and pull yours in an equal way. I guess our gravity has to be flung out into the void at its own force in order to find a matching orbit.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“People age even in pictures. Champagne glasses can stay full. With enough of a leap you could say that pictures amongst the galaxies and quasars capture a tiny bit of the universe for however long they last. The only thing pictures cannot do is keep someone alive in anything but memory after they have passed. Some pictures although painful to look at should always stay up on our walls to remind us from time to time of who we have loved.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“The biggest lie I ever told anyone was that I would not leave.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“It was if I made love to a nymph of the mountains or air or wind and she had come to me to make me fall in love and leave, with some grand plan behind those actions. The last time I saw her she was just looking anywhere but me, a magical siren who I was helpless to look at staring at her distant gaze. A side profile of one of the most beautiful things I would ever see, with her hair blowing through the fall Melbourne wind.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“The truly cost effective lifestyle would be to produce everything you require, it would subsequently imply a self-created kind of freedom. Time would be lost but it would all be your own, this however does not account for skill. The current institutionalised education system was not made for self-sustainability but rather extreme specialisation. The business sector itself accounts for a large amount of activity, so much so that it has its own defining term: the economy. Spaces in the world, both virtual and spatial have always had the socio-polticial-economic system but now it is more defined, more contested and more vulnerable.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“The last step before death is the moment of its demise. The emptiness or the new life. But the last step is also a point of reference itself. The last step can last as short or as long as its creator defines it. The last step could be before death itself. It could be the middle of death. It could be the last goodbye or the last look before eyelids drop to a close like curtains.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke