I will be gone and you will never know I was here.

Struggle, and fail! Life is failure. The failure of the mind to comprehend, the failure of the body to persist, the failure of the ego to accept that life is finite and failing.

We screw down and find the cells breathing, the atoms spinning, the quarks pulsing, pulsing, pulsing in and out of existence, and it is revealed that the primary illusion, the primary fantasy, is identity.

Loving is as pointless and as passionate and as terrible as all the rest of the experience of living.

She spoke the words in English. "You are a good man."

“If we twist it, if we tweak it in some way … If we created a great enemy, or dramatized a great struggle … If we gave people some great identity, some great purpose, some great hope … This thing could become big. Do not ever let it become big. Let this remain small, and insignificant. Its significance is in its insignificance. … Don't worship it, don't fear it: just acknowledge it.”

Evangelical solipsism... That must be an old joke.

Any life is insignificant.
But the people play their parts, and play them with gusto, because they believe that their lives are significant.
Looking through the microscope at microorganisms, then the ocean with the microorganisms floating on the surface that extends to a far horizon in every direction, and travel over the ocean, and more, more microorganisms, and then the generations, the generations long dead of the microorganisms, and a person is but one microorganism, insignificant on a scale incomprehensible to the human mind.

Living is just a habit.

"While we live, we search."

Demandant death is cardinal; all else is diversionary.

Writing is thinking.

just this immense, ineffable sadness...

Up all night tonight. No solace, no solace.

I've met Karen Eliot. She's Canadian. She's also a man.

Who are you?

Buddhistically?: "I am not." Egotistically?: "I am Radigan." Poetically?: "I am no-one, who are you? I am no-one, so are you."

"...yet as humans named the winds and rains and sun and moon and bestowed upon them human personalities and foibles and desires and as humans named the universe and declared him to have human wrath and vengeance and mercy and love, so we will name the creatures of the dark and depict them with human characteristics and actions and perceptions and dialogue, and thus perpetuate our grand fiction that the forces beyond us are understandable to us; we are but slugs in the slime who can perceive only the slime yet believe that a dinosaur standing with one clawed toe in the slime is a thing that could be known to us: as the slugs describe the dinosaur's claw in slug terms, so we shall describe Slaed in human terms."

There are these things we must do in order to stay alive, but there are also these things we must do because we are alive.

“...I am the might of the conscious mind...”

I have no addictions. No interests, therefore no addictions.

It is a terrible thing to fall in love; you never fall out of love.

Illogic motivates much of human behavior.

Brapp, brapp, brapp (that's the sound me thinking).

We all take, take, take. We are strange takers of strangers.

If you periodically shatter and scatter, that is the cycle where I want to be involved with you, what I want to induce in you, the dissolution and fragmentation and enlivening and liberation from guilt and worry and grace.

I do not feel shame. I am a cogitating animal, aware of the fiction of supernatural moralities and the relativity of sociocultural moralities.

Bombast. Everything tends to be so bloody boring, including people, including you, including me.

Everything you have been told is incorrect. Everything you have figured out yourself is incorrect.

I do nothing because there is nothing to do, and nothing to be done, and to believe that there is leads a path to misery.

Thinking is a rarity.

Aggaga.

A sound of harried assent.

Life is a booger, but oblivion has Nothing going for it.

What is love, anyway? Hell. Death.

Identity is an illusion, a vanity.

I can say the things within me until I die and you can listen to every one of them and you will still not know who I am. Nor I you. Nor anyone anyone.

I could tell you I love you. I could tell you I hate you. I could tell you I am not capable of loving, nor of hating. It all feels honest -- so how do I know what is honest?

Regardless of diseases, your body will break down and you will die.

There is no 'forward' to go to. There is only now.

What am I doing? I'm waiting on death, and so are you, whether or not you understand so.

Ambition is for suckers and Americans. It is vanity to believe that your particular life is important and that anything you do is of consequence.

All is emptiness.

Spend more time in the library. It makes life bigger; the possibilities flow into your head.

Make it grand, bold, preposterous.

As unresponsive as a corpse, and as provoking of the same disturbed reactions in people.

I'm frustrated by my narrow human intelligence. I'm trapped within it.

Look to the future! Farther, farther. Look far forward into the future and everything is dead, all existence has ceased.

I'm beyond the fate of the world.

Forsake the world.

“There's nothing here.”

“There's nothing anywhere.”

Hell opened underneath us and there was no way to escape falling in.

People are always dying, in every moment, in this moment.

Inside the hull of the warship when the shell detonates.

Pieces, pieces, pieces...

...a philosophical indifference to existence...

Here, our gentleness is tough; our toughness is gentle.

Action so often accomplishes nothing.

It's best if at the end of the day one is sweaty and dirty.

I drink too much and yet not enough.

Have you been educated in the winding tunnels of mind-funking?

Literature is almost never polite.

I am a wintry soul.

No, I am a rainy soul. No, I am not a soul, without personhood. No, I am the only soul, the everything. But then what would that make you, if anything?

Accepting as foregone the conclusion that you are as hippie as hippie can be, which parts of your hippieness do you denounce? The general grunginess? The transience and shallow connectivity of hippie relationships? The non-productivity of the hippie lifestyle, while the squares grow the food and mend the roads and engineer the furnaces that we hippies survive by?

Do you live with guilt? Do you live with loneliness? Do you live with dirt? is I guess what I'm saying.

All experience is cosmically disappointing.

“Hi, my name is Radigan. My hobbies are embroidery, racecar driving, and heroin.”

There is no complete joy. Every joy is leavened by the immeasurable sadness of its ephemerality.

“What does it feel like to be a man?”
“Painful.”

Don't play Russian roulette with an automatic pistol.

I feel a great sadness for lives not lived. All the decisions made resulting in all the lives precluded...

We live in a harsh gleaming world, the noise is constant, and the light [I forgot the rest]

But got to be somewhere
And nowhere for too long

Nothing accomplished; nothing to be accomplished.

Orange!: blaze orange, fire orange, Buddhist orange, orangepeel orange, naranja.

flense the meat from my bones

“I'm really basically an artist. Which just means, I'm not socially useful.”

When you don't fit into your own culture, it is easy to not fit into other cultures.

J watches romantic comedy movies; he does not watch war movies because he has lived through war. I watch war movies; I do not watch romantic comedy movies because I have lived through romantic comedy.

While you may wish for many attributes, never wish for keenness of comprehension.

Grow old, become hairy.

pray to Satan, my Dark Lord

he doesn't exist, and you don't either

What you remember is what there was
What you perceive is what there is

the steering column through your chest cavity
You feel it only once

Baatar stepped his right foot to the edge, shifted his weight to his right foot and pivoted on his right foot. In his pivot, his gaze swept into the abyss that was now directly off his right boot and Baatar the Immortal Monster, the Slayer, the Will, the Psyche, the Lust for Living, the Hero of His Own Story, the Only Character in the Only Story, paused. Baatar paused and stared. The tip of his sword dipped to the stone floor. There was Nothing to be seen.

But something must matter, mustn't it? And I must care about something, mustn't I? I care about beauty, but surely beauty doesn't matter. I care about poetry. Nothing could matter less than poetry.

Intelligence cannot be faked. But I try.

Do coincidences mean anything to you? I'll offer: they mean nothing to me. No evidence of secret order to the universe, no guiding forces, no supernatural intelligences. The human mind, so successful at increasing the evolutionary adaptability of the human species because it is so adept at identifying patterns, is also so flawed by the same talent because it so often sees patterns where none exist.

But maybe you believe in Magic?

What a great love I once had.

What a common belief.

I like listening to the goings-on of the world at 2:30 at night.

Tell me about it, the loneliness of literature.

I do not recycle for the same reason that I do not play the lottery: because I understand mathematics.

The United States produces annually 254,000,000.00 short tons of garbage. One United States resident produces annually 0.84 short tons of garbage.(1)

For comparison, represent the garbage that one U.S. resident annually produces as one second. The garbage that the U.S. annually produces is then represented as nine and a half years. The difference that one second makes over a span of nine and a half years is incomprehensibly inconsequential. The garbage that any single U.S. resident produces is incomprehensibly inconsequential.

To act, one must be so vain as to believe that one's actions are of consequence; to recycle, you must believe that you make a difference, despite the mathematical truth that you do not make a difference.

Humans motivate their actions through egregious irrationality or outrageous vanity.

To be rational and undeluded about your relative value as a member of human society is to be philosophically closer to oblivion.

(1) United States Environmental Protection Agency, Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2007

Is it really okay? It's a missed connection, isn't it? It's a fear and a sadness, and a sense that each individual is not worth so very much, because there are so many individuals, and how to distinguish them?

People are generally not interested in other people, so to be forthcoming is to be boring, because no one really cares. At the same time, people are generally vain, so they like to be forthcoming. This means that people are generally boring to one another.

The most difficult thing about being alone is remaining alone; other people regularly challenge your aloneness.

Humans are not very interesting creatures. Their behavior is simple and repetitive, and established and basically unchangeable by the time they're eight years old.

I have a bad and worsening habit of ignoring people.

I have a good and improving habit of ignoring people.

What I write is not disturbing. Conscious existence is disturbing.

I don't understand other humans' emotions and motivations. I can perceive them and ape them and cognitively diagram them, but I can't overlook the pointlessness. These soft organic unhardy precariously organized creatures are going to die. They know they are going to die. Why do they not act like they are going to die?

I have a terminal condition. It is my life. Why does this condition bother me when the same condition does not bother you? You do not think about the circumscribed epoch of your life. I think about it.

Nothing exists beyond this moment, so nothing can be lost.

I do not like religious fantasy, and all religious thought is fantasy.

You do not want to know my thoughts, you would not like them, you would never accept them, and, most hopeless of all, you could not understand them.

On every occasion, accept chewing gum when it is offered.