She was what we used to call a suicide blonde—dyed by her own hand.

A cup of coffee—real coffee—home-browned, home-ground, home-made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a coffee is a match for twenty blue devils, and will exorcise them all.

We were taken to a fast-food café where our order was fed into a computer. Our hamburger, made from the flesh of chemically impregnated cattle, had been broiled over counterfeit charcoal, placed between slices of artificially flavored cardboard and served to us by recycled juvenile delinquents.

[Eve:] “What's the singing of the birds, Adam?”

[Adam:] “The birds themselves that become air. To sing is to spill oneself in drops of air, in threads of air, to tremble. Then the birds are ripe and their throat falls in leaves, and their leaves are soft, pungent, sometimes quick.”

[…]

[Eve:] “I want to sing! I have some stiffled air, an air of bird and me… I will sing!”

[Adam:] “You are always singing but don't realize it. You are just as water. The rocks don't realize it either and their silent minerals gather and sing, silently.”

[Eva:] “¿Qué es el canto de los pájaros, Adán?”

[Adán:] “Son los pájaros mismos que se hacen aire. Cantar es derramarse en gotas de aire, en hilos de aire, temblar. Entonces lo pájaros estan maduros y se les cae la garganta en hojas y sus hojas son suaves, penetrantes, a veces rápidas.”

[…]

[Eva:]“¡Yo quiero cantar! Tengo un aire apretado, un aire de pájaro y de mí. ¡Yo voy a cantar!”

[Adán:]“Tú estas cantando siempre sin darte cuenta. Eres igual que el agua. Tampoco las piedras se dan cuenta y su cal silenciosa se reúne y canta silenciosamente.”

If one could find what ought to be said, when all the words have left the field like scared pigeons!

¡Si uno pudiera encontrar lo que hay que decir, cuando todas
las palabras se han levantado del campo como palomas asustadas!

His idea is that whenever you encounter […] any other living thing, man, woman, or stray cat… you are simply encountering your “other end”… and the universe is just a little thing we whipped up among us the other night for our entertainment and then agreed to forget the gag.

May those who love us love us
And for those who don't love us
May God turn their hearts,
And if He can't turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles,
So we may know them by their limping.

…nothing more than a cheap facade, like a garish afghan flung over a rotted-out sofa

When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind's eye: “The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter's box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from home plate.” and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions.

This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general.

It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick.

The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful.

The chirping of sparrows could be heard from the window. The sparrows were speaking to each other in the pear tree. What a privilege it was to be woken by the sparrows and not by the siren.

Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.

I've started wearing my nosering again, mostly because despite the image of purity that radiated from my transfigured face without it, I just didn't look as cool. I missed that little sparkle when the sun caught it, the glint I could just barely see if I closed my left eye.

Summer comes quickly to Lansquenet in the wake of the March winds, and it smells of the circus; of sawdust and frying batter and cut green wood and animal shit.

Altogether, I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, at a pinch, also write ourselves. We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. This I believe.

Ich glaube, man sollte überhaupt nur solche Bücher lesen, die einen beißen und stechen. Wenn das Buch, das wir lesen, uns nicht mit einem Faustschlag auf den Schädel weckt, wozu lesen wir dann das Buch? Damit es uns glücklich macht, wie Du schreibst? Mein Gott, glücklich wären wir eben auch, wenn wir keine Bücher hätten, und solche Bücher, die uns glücklich machen, könnten wir zur Not selber schreiben. Wir brauchen aber die Bücher, die auf uns wirken wie ein Unglück, das uns sehr schmerzt, wie der Tod eines, den wir lieber hatten als uns, wie wenn wir in Wälder verstoßen würden, von allen Menschen weg, wie ein Selbstmord, ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. Das glaube ich.

The last three minutes of this film [Requiem for a Dream]… like staring into the sun.

[on Requiem for a Dream] It's a modern horror film. We always saw this as a monster movie except that the monster was invisible. The creature was invisible. It was addiction, living in the character's head and the only other difference is that the creature wins.

…this is a system invented by people [programmers] to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners.