mercifulserpent

"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours."

The Weight of Glory

"In the lives of children, pumpkins can turn into coaches, mice and rats into human beings. When we grow up, we learn that it's far more common for human beings to turn into rats."
Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

Galinda seemed to give up. She leaned her head back on the velvet cushions of the swing and said, "Boq, you know despite myself I think you're a little sweet. You're a little sweet and you're a little charming and you're a little maddening and you're a little habit-forming."
Boq held his breath.
"But you're little!" she concluded. "You're a Munchkin, for god's sake!"
He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little.
- Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West


Was it an accident I saw that, Fiyero wondered,
looking at the manager with new eyes.
Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you,
again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?.

GM, Wicked

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.
GM, Wicked

"There!" said several voices. "It isn't an animal at all. It's not alive."
"I tell you, it is an animal," said the Bulldog. "Smell it for yourself."
"Smelling isn't everything," said the Elephant.
"Why," said the Bulldog, "if a fellow can't trust his nose, what is he to trust?"
"Well, his brains perhaps," she replied mildly.

C. S. Lewis in The Magician's Nephew

"Then it was you who wounded Aravis?"
"It was I."
"But what for?"
"Child, I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no-one any story but his own."

in The Horse and his Boy, by C. S. Lewis.

"When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude toward that object."

Mere Christianity

Friedrich Nietzsche - Eternal Recurrence
From The Gay Science
341. The greatest stress

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more, and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You
will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or
even your bathtub.
-- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which
ones to keep.
-- Scott Adams, 'The Dilbert Principle'

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
-- John Updike, Problems and Other Stories

Maps encourage boldness. They're like cryptic love letters. They make
anything seem possible.
-- Mark Jenkins, "To Timbuktu"

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): You have underestimated how
much happiness you are capable of attracting into your life.
Believe it or not, this artificially low expectation has cheated you out of your fair share of joy, pleasure, fulfillment, and a sense of meaning. Your assignment for the next four weeks is to jack up your levels of happiness by at least 20 percent. Work hard at this task, Taurus -- at least as hard as you do at your job. (The greater your effort, the more cosmic assistance you'll receive.) To get started, divest yourself of a mediocre thrill that distracts you from an intelligence-building excitement.

"The others have gone," she said. "They are scattered to the woods they came from, no two together, and men will not catch sight of them much more easily than if they were still in the sea. I will go back to my forest too, but I do not know if I will live contentedly there, or anywhere. I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, though I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret."





tlu

Cousins, I want all of you to go to
your windows. Go to your windows
and yell, scream with all the life
you can muster up inside your
assaulted, bruised amd battered
bodies.


I'm sick and tired of being a
nigger and I'm not gonna take it
anymore.

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant. She is always carrying bags of clothes, bouquets of roses, take-out Chinese containers, or bagels. Museum tags fill her pockets and purses, along with perfume samples and invitations to art gallery openings. When she is walking to work, to ward off bums or psychos, her face resembles the Statue of Liberty, but at home in her candlelit, dove-colored apartment, the stony look fades away and she smiles like the sterling roses she has bought for herself to make up for the fact that she is single and her feet are sore.

- from I Was a Teenage Fairy by Francesca Lia Block



Maybe Mab was real. Maybe she was the fury, the courage, the sex. Whatever Mab had been, now, joined with her tiny winged red-haired biscuit, Mab was the love, flying through the night like an errant star that had longed to know, even briefly, what make planet Earth's children weep and sing. - I Was A Teenage Fairy by Francesca Lia Block


Barbie was no longer afraid of anything. It was like the thing Mab had said about belief. The belief is sometimes the biggest part of it all. You can choose to believe in your published book being held in the loving hands of strangers, your name tattooed forever on the heart of the one you adore; you can choose to believe in tiny red-haired pesk piskies - all the things 'they' may tell you not to believe in. But who are they anyway? What do they know? What makes them any more real? And now, Barbie realized, I am telling Mab to believe. I am telling Belief herself to believe. - I Was A Teenage Fairy by Francesca Lia Block

la.