I do not own you, but I own you.

You are not my slave, but you are my slave.

“...in that thick Russian accent: 'Bad things happen. That is life. But there is no need to think about the bad things. Live. Live!'...”

Scribbling on paper
As if I had something worth saying

"You got that? It's for children."

"It's marketed for children. Anyone can use it. Marketing is not reality."

“There is a fourth jaguar.”

“Do you think you'll make it through another winter?”

Consider:

"If you get handed lemons... make lemonade!" But lemons are not the only ingredient in lemonade; also required is water and sugar. If all you are handed is lemons, then all you can make is lemon juice, sour to drink. Sugar is what makes lemonade sweet. The adage assumes that you are handed not only lemons but also sugar, or that you had a sufficient store of sugar prior. Without sugar, if you are handed lemons, you simply cannot make lemonade.

And of course, it commonly occurs that, both figuratively and literally, there is no sugar.

Sometimes there is not even water.

I don't like to give out a mediocre book, which is why my library is filled with mediocre books, because I give out all the good ones.

How precarious, life.

To tell the truth, there is no truth.

Acorn into oak.

“My life is not here. This is comfortable. My life is not meant to be comfortable.”

“There will be more.”

“There will be no more.”

Both equally ominous.

And equally vague.

And therefore equally meaningless.

Cardboard boxes, plastic bags, and extension cords: however many you have is five too short.

Life is killing me.

I do not ascribe meaning to mundane occurrences. I do not ascribe meaning to extraordinary events. (Existence is utterly and unutterably meaningless.)

That math evinces a divine, supra-human nature is not a certainty, but rather a philosophical supposition.

I would enjoy to retire to an empty place and study math.

"He's the monster."

"He's all that's human."

By the cover? I judge books by the spine.

“It's numbered by the days since I was born. Yes, my days are numbered. So are yours: you're just not keeping track.”

“It is a very potent message: All social taboos and mores are imaginary and invented and have no impact on the physical functioning of the universe.”

When you are laying dying

--as you will be--

what will you think about?

Pain rather than oblivion?

“Your poetry is depressing.”
“My poetry reflects existence. Existence is depressing.”

All words are merely references to other things.

“Take compliments, ignore insults... And you acknowledge the inconsistency of accepting the expressed opinions of others in certain arbitrary cases and rejecting the expressed opinions of others in certain other arbitrary cases?”

My understanding is that all lives are meaningless, tragi-comically.

“You know, it is impossible to distinguish sincerity from sarcasm over the Internet.”

There can be no intimacy between those who are not lovers, because there is no sex. There can be no intimacy between those who are lovers, because there is sex.

The summer comes again, to the winter's survivors.

Push, pull, coax, caress, entice... Must a conversation merely breathe, or should it gasp, pant, huff, gyrate and arc and wriggle, and finally whimper softly, gratefully...?

Freedom is a culturally constrained notion -- which means, there is no such thing.

Do not fail to feel yourself close to death at every moment. Act accordingly.

How to diagnose one's own insanity? The world makes sense to me, but it obviously makes a different sense to other people.

“How can you sit like that? You can't possibly be comfortable.”

“I am never comfortable. Thus, I can sit in any position.”

Militaries exist only to serve the political machinations of rich people, and by every account, the experience of soldiering amounts only to boredom, frustration, and seeing other people's intestines splattered about.

"This is a matter of national security. This is important."
"It's only important if you think any of that shit matters."
"A lot of people might die."
"No, all people will die. Whether they live another year or ten or two hundred is not important, except to themselves, and that is a matter of vanity."

Everyone is going to die. (Everyone you know is going to die. Everyone you love is going to die.) You know this, yet you are surprised by each instance of the gradual actualization of this.

For every thing I say, there are thousands of things I don't say, because no one would understand.

Have you ever had two men standing guard outside your door as you slept? No. Have you ever killed every person in the room? No. Have you ever been brutalized? Yes, of course you have.

Probabilities.

Death is our destiny.

“I don't care if anyone ever reads it. I simply want to write it.”

“Don't you forget what I am, which is a danger to every thought you think and every feeling you feel.”

“I don't want that stuff even described to me.”

“I can tell you what animal it came out of. It came out of a jaguar. I watched it come out of it.”

Syntax murky I am fine with.

Life is slow death.

after being up all night, I wake at 4:50 in the afternoon and write down these thoughts:

You are a guest at a large dinner with many guests, and you know that the food is poisoned. What do you do? Do you try to dissuade others from eating any way you can? Do you try to dissuade others from eating with the truth, and endure the suspicion that you poisoned the food? Do you excuse yourself from the dinner without explanation? Do you excuse yourself with explanation? Do you pretend to eat? Do you converse and laugh and feast and share fate with the rest of the diners?

Now here's the problem: Life is that dinner, everyone you know is at the dinner, and the food is poisoned.

You can have a carefree life as long as you have nothing to do with other people.

The horror is the pointlessness of the horror.

“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.