You Can't Wake, I Can't Sleep

Hooker: Think yourself smart. I wish it was me. Take for your head and be who you wanna be.
Alice: But how can I be who I wanna be when I am who I am?
Caterpillar: When memories come back, some you keep and some you trash in the can.
Hooker: You've been dealt the cards, just rearrange the deal.

Alison: You're so interesting, Wes. It's like time doesn't matter to you.

Wes: Are you kidding me? Things go by so fast…I don't get it.

Alison: Yeah, but it doesn't freak you out. You're so patient, so calm. I don't know. I mean sometimes you're really quiet and you get this look on your face like time doesn't exist. That's how you make me feel, like I have all the time in the world because time doesn't exist. It's nice. Thank you.

*
Alison: I don't like change, it's very disorienting. I mean something changes in your life andyou have adapt which means you have to change but what if i like who i am and don't want to change? Sometimes I cant even tell if I'm moving forward or I'm like frozen. It makes me feel like I'm not in control of my life…it's kinda scary don't you think?

Wes: It's not that bad…being scared doesn't mean you're in a bad situation, it just means new things are coming your way. It depends on how you see your future i guess.

Alison: What do you mean?

Wes: Do you see it as this thing far, far away full of ideals and wonderful impossible things or do you see it as the next hour, the next moment?

Alison: Does it really matter?

Wes: I think so. One definitely feels better than the other.

***
that awkwardly narcissistic moment when you're watching a film and are fairly convinced someone's based a character off you.

"Anne Sexton sometimes seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so
intensely, had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday
events often seemed unbearable to her. Paradoxically it is also that
skinlessness which makes a poet. One must have the gift of language,
...but even a great gift is useless without the other curse: the eyes that
see so sharply they often want to close." -Erica Jong

Book: Lancelot  by Walker Percy
Reminds me of: Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, the movie "Closer," other things I can't place.
( um a terrible ton of quotage here )
(also, there are like a million great quotes in his other book which I read first, The Moviegoer, and which kind of had no plot and was less good, but parts of it were incredibly worded and so true, but my fingers are all typed out for tonight and I still have more clothes to sort through. Like why do I have clothes from when I was in 8th grade? SRSLY?)

Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny.

and

"Floating at the same time on that other surface between here and far away, between then and now," And between remembered happiness, she was thinking, and this insistent, excruciating presence of an absence. "Floating,' she said aloud, "on the surface between the real and the imagined, between what comes to us from the outside, and what comes to use from within, from deep, deep down in here." She laid her hand on his forehead.

and

The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve endings and his cleverness won't allow it.

                                                                                                                                          - Aldous Huxley, Island

Currently reading for Ontd_Lost_Reads .  Can you believe I've never read any Huxley before?? Kind of in love.  Also, finished Walker Percy's Lancelot (sick and twisted and brilliant and skdfjdkljf!!) and am stuck in the middle of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling for my personal LOST reading project, where I just choose books based on what seem interesting.  And I have to read a CS Lewis book I haven't started yet but looks like a one-nighter for my LOST book club that meets in real life.  So, seriously, I'm moving through the list pretty quickly. Despite having 200 pages of reading due for journalism by Monday, but I'm totally keeping up with that.  Whatever.  Books are my life.  If I ever get married, I'm registering at Barnes and Noble.  For serious.  I think I shall attempt Watership Down next for the mere reason that I'm dreading it, based on the fact that I tried to read it when I was eight, because I saw it among my parents' books and there was a fucking bunny on the cover and I was like "Oh wow! This is going to be an awesome story all about bunnies!" and then I read a good chunk of it and was WTF, this is the most boring bunny adventure story EVER. I think all the social commentary pretty  much went over my tiny head and I went back to reading, like, the Bunnicula books/  Vampire bunny, who can go wrong? I still have The Celery Stalks At Midnight in my room somewhere.  And like...Sleepover Friends or whatever the fuck else I read back then. Oh, that sounds porny!

Also, I think I want to be a copy editor.  So far, that's been my favorite thing about my journalism class - those exercises where you go through sentences and correct grammar and move the words around to make sentences that are more clear and double check the math on statistics related such.  I was copy editor for my high school yearbook, although that was somewhat different.  And I know it's funny because on lj I just kind of ramble and think grammar doesn't really apply to me, and am often fairly incoherent. But i can write well when I care??

"He knows it is beautiful to be born as the particular with the universal as his home, his friendly abode, which receives him straightaway with open arms when he wishes to stay there.  But he also knows that higher up there winds a lonely path, narrow and steep; he knows it is terrible to be born in solitude outside the universal, to walk without meeting a single traveller.  He knows very well where he is, and how he is related to men.  Humanly speaking, he is insane and cannot make himself understood to anyone."  - Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

"But what no one has the right to do is let others suppose that faith is something inferior or that it is an easy matter, when in fact it is the greatest and most difficult of all." - Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

from The Last Summer (of You and Me) by Ann Brashares.

http://katherineanneausten.tumblr.com/tagged/ann+brashares

having to type up all your freaking highlit passages before being able to give away a book is kind of an issue :/

fucking OCD.

anyway i really love this book even if it's soapy or beach reading or whatever the frak.

“Even if you’re unhappy, just pretend that you’re happy. Eventually, your smile will be contagious to yourself. I had to learn that, I used to think, ‘I’m being fake,’ but you know what? Better to be fake and happy than real and miserable.”
- Evangeline Lilly