The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

 ― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles  

Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them.

Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow. Ben Marcus

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level. Ben Marcus

My goal, with whatever I'm working on, is to lose track of time. Ben Marcus

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me. Ben Marcus

It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability. Ben Marcus

“If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family.”

 Ram Dass

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. Thomas Merton

Nightclothes in the Outdoors

I just saw a man in a red flannel bathrobe on the sidewalk leaning into a car window to talk to the driver. Last weak at 6:30 AM my neighbor was standing in her backyard barefoot in silk pajama shorts and short-sleeved top. I was wearing my thermals and jeans and sweatshirt and coat neck gator and hat.

 I never saw my parents in their bathrobes let alone my neighbors. Now I see people wearing fuzzy slippers or flannel pajama pants at the bus stop. 

What's up is down, what's down is up. It's just wild.

Habit is Stronger than Fear

Baked Potato Instructions:

1. Pre-heat oven to 425°F. Wash and dry potatoes.
2. With a fork or sharp knife, pierce each potato 2 or 3 times.
3. Rub each potato with a little oil (just enough to lightly coat) and salt generously.
4. Place on a cookie sheet or baking pan. Bake 50 to 60 minutes or until tender when pierced with a fork.
5. (with herbed cottage cheese) recipe 

“Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.”

― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore  

“Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.”

― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

 “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.” ― Haruki Murakami

Alda Sigmundsdóttir: In Iceland, swimming pools are our unofficial community centres. They are our equivalent of the British pub, or the French café.

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”

― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

 “Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

 “Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore