Wednesday, July 30, 2003
 

I'm at home, and part of being at home is maternally-mandated cleanup time. I've been stripping at least ten years' worth of stuff (for lack of a better word) off the walls. We foolishly believed the PlasTak (or similiar product, the sticky putty stuff) advertising that said it wouldn't harm walls, but it's ended up bringing large chunks of wall off with it. Parents, let your kids use pushpins. When they move out, repaint, and everything's hunky-dory. Not to mention easier to pry off.

Anyway. Behind the door to my room, on that wall, was a wall full of index cards with quotations, mostly from books (I seem to recall that this was inspired by Salinger). Because I don't feel like writing a deep entry (you know, unlike my usual profundities, though I'm sure I could wax eloquently on the fact that the eBay server is being difficult, thus preventing me from bidding on a BCBG / To the Max hoodie), I'm going to print some choice quotations from my wall-file. I haven't read the vast majority of these books in many years, so please indulge my trip down memory lane:

• "Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist: "I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living." -- Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
  
  
• "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
  
  There is another which states that this has already happened." --Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
  
  
• "I think that if the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness." --Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
  
  
• "If I'd had the power not to be born, I would certainly not have accepted existence upon conditions that are such a mockery." --Dostoevsky, The Idiot
  
  
• "And if there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara." --Phil Ochs (probably mid-1960s, but that's a guess)
  
  
• A man said to the universe:
  "Sir, I exist!"
  "However," replied the universe,
  "The fact has not created in me
  A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane
  
  
• "Query: Is not a common hate one of the strongest links in human nature? Answer, most regrettably, in the affirmative." --E.M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady
  
  
• "I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough he might become disturbed." --James Thurber, origin not noted
  
  
• "Solitude is independence." --Hesse, Stepphenwolf
  
  
• "Wake up and smell the Kafka." --Rita Rudner, Naked Beneath My Clothes
  
  
• "Abhorred of God is any who loves geometry; it is a spiritual sin." --seventeenth century Russian bishop (source is Palmer and Colton's modern history text, if memory serves)
  
  
• "It might be pepper for a cold feast, but I always did say that the fact that men are, is more interesting than anything they might do--"--Kerouac, Visions of Gerard
  
  
• "He left a paper sealed up, wherein were found three articles as his last will: 'I owe much; I have nothing; I give the rest to the poor.'" --Rabelais, Motteux's Life
  
  
• "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." --Vonnegut, Mother Night
  
  

I think the moral here, if any, is: "Once a cynic, always a cynic." --Me. ElvisetteY. Philosophy Slam

Elvisette philosophized at 9:26 PM