“I guess I was sleeping. I thought I was lying there thinking, but I was actually dreaming.”

She looked up from the picture book and at me with her big eyes -- she was afraid.

I picked her up and squeezed her. "No no no, Sweetie, those monsters aren't real. Your mother is real, and I am real, and the ger about us is real. But those monsters are the thoughts of other people, only thoughts, like dreams. You don't see monsters like you see your mother and me and the ger and the world. And when our part of the world turns away from the light each day for the night, the darkness that encompasses us is empty. There are no monsters in it. The darkness is empty."

I didn't tell her that the emptiness is fearful.

“Nothing is worthwhile.”
“This is worthwhile.”
“This is nothing.”

Freshen your world by looking at it as though you were dying. Because you are.

Consensus creates reality. Or the individual creates reality, in spite of consensus? Those are -- must be -- the only two options. But individual reality... I wrote a book on that.

It is easy to be courageous when you are insensible to the exterior world and its dangers.

Ambition in a corporeally contained consciousness is pointless to the point of obscenity. For when the blast opens your chest, or the chemicals corrode your liver, or the automobile smashes your spine, or the disease devours your brain, or the cricket bat flattens the back of your head, or the decay triumphs as it must, you discover that all mortal ambition definitively reduces to a bloody smear, and that all that stress you suffered in pursuit of something was for nothing, and you could have instead spent your finite days relaxing and reading philosophy.

I am capable of destroying everything, but I destroy nothing, for nothing exists, not a thing.

Complete resistance to brainwashing indicates only brainlessness.

“It wouldn't take you long to find someone else to stir your honey. I know the fickleness of women; such is legendary.”

Wilful denial preserves most people from the brutality of living in a universe in which life persists only by devouring other life; my sole social solecism is to not bother with that denial.

The circumstances of all life are bleak.

If you've eaten meat, you've murdered animals; you just paid someone else to do your wet work.

We had cats on the farm when I was young. But they stayed in the barn. They were all named “cat.” They fed themselves. They would disappear for six months at a time, and then show up again, or not show up again. They were pettable, but generally uninterested. They hung around because the barn was warm and the rodent presence that is inalienably associated with any human presence provided them with a food source. The consumable detritus that we generated was a bonus. When they would have kittens in the hayloft, we would cuddle and pet them and try to play with them. It was only possible when they were yet tiny; they constantly tried to get away, and did as soon as they could. Dad would usually kill half the litter by knocking them in the head. In a litter of six to eight kittens, if you killed half, then one or two might live to adulthood. Sometimes Dad didn't thin the litter, and they would all die.

Life is cheap; non-human life particularly so.

Human, mortal expectations are facile, useless, and pitiful; people should be expecting nothing but death.

Humans dominate their entire environment; the only animals that exist within that environment are those that provide some use to the humans or those that the humans allow to remain existing. There's nothing evil in this, just as there is nothing evil or good in anything (evil and good being human conceptual constructs applied to an indifferent material universe).

However, to adjudge actions and practices in the context of what we value: the phenomenon of taking and keeping animal “pets” in the wealthy countries seems the most psychologically abhorrent of all forms of human exploitation of animals. Humans in wealthy countries physically imprison animals; forcibly and unalterably remove the animals' reproductive, defensive, and food-acquiring capacities; and compel the once independent animals to become entirely dependent upon their slave-master captors, and all so that the animals can provide some emotional gratification to these awful humans. If you're laughing then you're missing the point; there is no exaggeration here. To see people without food, and then to see fat, comfortable people giving food to animals that they keep around for emotional exploitation (because it is easier to extract emotional stimulus from a trapped and dependent animal than it is to develop and maintain emotional bonds with other free-thinking and free-acting humans), one cannot help but feel barren over the blatant and obscene lie of “human values.”

“Is it a bookshelf, or a display shelf? If you display stuff in front of the books, it's no longer a bookshelf, is it?”

Don't hold me to the words that I scribble in the middle of the night to no one.

Hope is tragedy in gestation.

Life doesn't 'work out in the end.' People just die.

“...for weak-minded individuals who lack the moral fiber to accept fundamental meaninglessness, religious or spiritual belief does serve some purpose...”

Life is a burning, burning arrow.

How could thought—which is without substance—have influence upon a substantial world?

Your belief that you exist is vanity. Individuality, personality, character, identity is an illusion.

Living is not healthy. All is grinding towards death.

Life is pointless. All living is done in defiance of this.

There is no such thing as obscenity.

We don't care about your childhood.

"Nothing is worse than not knowing what's going on."

"Tsk, that's existence."

"Death is the end. Nothing comes after, remember this. Peace. Peace, oblivion. I wish you peace."

I am an agglomeration of molecules agitated. The agitation will not allay!, until death.

Ryder looked over the roof of the Pontiac. "Bryce... what's the point?"

Grinning, seating himself, closing the door, strapping in, revving the engine, staring forward, grinning, grinning: "That is the question, isn't it? What is the point? What is the godfucking, axlebreaking point?"

There is no path to enlightenment. There is no enlightenment.

"You think that I am complex? You wonder what is the real me? I tell you again: there is no me. I do not exist. Identity is an illusion."

"Where you from, boy?"
"Someplace you ain't never been, girl."

You could no more turn from my kiss than the earth could turn from the sun.

Which it does, in fact. Every day, in fact.

...my thoroughgoing perversity quashed that.

Fight for liberty? [Murder people for liberty?] “Liberty”? A political prevarication. Whatever the lofty lies that the individual who wars believes that he or she wars for [whatever he or she murders for], the true motivator, as ever, is thrill for thrill's sake, action for action's sake, blood for blood's sake.

Mais oui, tout le monde... sans moi.

When I think of things that "change the world," I think of technologies. When I think of things that perpetuate political and social systems against upheaval and revolution, I think of history textbooks.

Though I hold U.S. citizenship, I speak of U.S. history in the third person plural, not the first person plural, because I was born in 1977, and I had nothing to do with anything that came before. I also speak of current politics (in the U.S., as in any country) in the third person plural, because I am not one of the decision makers.

...and all of life dies. All of life dies.

“War hero”? How can anyone be a hero for murdering people?

"Bryce swept his eyes around through the restaurant and saw the diners chatting, grinning, squabbling, romancing and thought of the pointlessness, the utter, awful pointlessness. Did he think it? No, he felt the pointlessness. He tasted the pointlessness of chatting, grinning, squabbling, romancing, struggling, eating, living, existing, thinking, feeling, tasting."

I remember everything, and often.

“That's why I worship Satan, because he's obviously the guy running things.”

Love is the horrible point where you lose the instinct to self-preservation.

“Ennui”? That's not a word that good girls use.

Slipping heavily down from the earth

A month is nothing; a month goes by and I don't even notice its passing.

Aye, a salvage operation, with oil slicks and Russian cutters and crusty sailors who constantly squint one eye... There be treasure in detritus.

I'm not an expert in anything, except in being Radigan.

Don't give them what they want; give them what there is.

"Vampirism isn't a fable. There is nothing supernatural about eating people."

I've been alone in this room too long. And what's with these damn crows? They're constantly crapping all over my bust of Pallas and throwing their shadows in impossible directions! And who the hell is Nevelle Moore?

O Queen of the Canadian Wastes, where blows your white heart now?

I don't care about pointless things. All things are pointless.

Nothing is divine; nothing is profane.

I don't really mean any of the things that I say, including the thing that I'm saying right now.

It is a good feeling, the sun coming up after a productive night.

"Your friend looks European; I know what Europeans look like."

"You want to learn about me not for what I am, but for what I might be."

I've loved. I've seduced. So, do it again?

Sad. Pervasive. Typical.

In the bourgeois vs. bohemian equation, spouses vs. lovers, accumulation vs. dissipation, security vs. freedom, I am on the far end of the latters.

If humanity has a savior, it was Kurt Cobain, because he delivered us from shitty '80s butt rock.

Skill in spelling was obviated two decades ago by SpellCheck. And complete sentences? Totally overrated.

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.