Words to Chew On

“Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.”

-Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. I demounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I’m a desperate man—but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.”

-Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him”

-Philip K. Dick, Valis

“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them”

-Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“I like when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty”

-Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence…into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life…It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious consequences…but it is right to chide man for being blind to such consequences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of dimension of beauty”

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars"
~Jorge Lui Borges, "Garden of the Forking Paths"

"So it goes"
-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five