Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

We will not end the nightmare. We'll only explain it.
— The Twilight Zone

I distrust every idea that doesn’t seem obsolete and grotesque to my contemporaries.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
— Brian Eno.

This is of two worlds–the one diurnal men know and that other world where lunar mottled eels stir like dreams in shallow forest water.
— Christopher Dewdney, opening lines to “This is of two worlds …,” The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, chosen by Margaret Atwood (Oxford University Press, 1982)

the unmade places
don’t exist unless we walk in them
— Philip Salom, from “Six in a Row of Made Things,” The Rome Air Naked

Landscape and memory are concepts that are strongly interwoven with the identity of a place and its inhabitants. Local myths, associations, habits, and rituals, shared fears, collective memory and common feelings are all intangible elements of a place that give it a certain allure and atmosphere, its sense of place, its genius loci. It is not only how a place is but also how it makes us feel, how we live and perform in it.
— Panita Karamanea, from “Landscape, Memory, and Contemporary Design,” Craft + Design Enquiry (Issue 7, 2015)

Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.
— Angela Carter, from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; “Wolf-Alice”

Only Zappa;


''One of my favourite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds''

''Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read'' -FZ

''If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library''

''No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to''

''Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff''

''Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe''

''Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST''

''Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid''

''There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another''

''I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird''

"Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal... There is a tendency... for certain people to use this phrase of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious—because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe—some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cake than others—some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of men."

—Atticus Finch, in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man.
— Ursula K. Le Guin

People can’t anticipate how much they’ll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it.
I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense “periscope liberty” - a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines - and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple of days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. “A baby!” he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran.
Nothing tops space as a barren, unnatural environment. Astronauts who had no prior interest in gardening spend hours tending experimental greenhouses. “They are our love,” said cosmonaut Vladislav Volkov of the tiny flax plants - with which they shared the confines of Salyut 1, the first Soviet space station. At least in orbit, you can look out the window and see the natural world below.
On a Mars mission, once astronauts lose sight of Earth, they’ll be nothing to see outside the window. “You’ll be bathed in permanent sunlight, so you won’t eve see any stars,” astronaut Andy Thomas explained to me.
“All you’ll see is black.”
— Mary Roach. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.

"No one can justify their existence by linking their happiest moments to a kind of rosary."
-Neon Genesis Evangelion

I've lost count of how many times that quote has come bubbling up from my subconscious to ruin my day.

Why are you kissing me? You know perfectly well that I’m fundamentally loathsome.
— Blue Of Noon, Georges Bataille

"We are shadows of tender fury; our dark wings will cover the sky again, and their protective cloak will shelter the dispossessed and the good men and women who understand that justice and peace go hand in hand. If they deny us our rights, then our tender fury will enter those fine mansions. There will be no fence our shadow will not jump over; no door will be left unopened, no window left unbroke, no wall left standing. Our shadow will bring pain to those who call for war and death for our race; more tears and blood will flow before peace can sit down at our table with goodwill."

~ Zapatista Army of National Liberation