i can't help quoting you

asleep @ 2010-07-16T00:03:00

2010-07-15T21:58:19Z

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life. I would kiss my piano teacher, even if he laughed at me. I would jump with Mary on the bed, even if I made a fool of myself. I would send out ugly photographs, thousands of them.

asleep @ 2010-07-15T23:35:00

2010-07-15T21:30:37Z

Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have.

asleep @ 2010-03-10T20:06:00

2010-03-10T19:04:24Z

You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.

asleep @ 2010-01-18T16:46:00

2010-01-18T15:42:50Z

"Sometimes when you want to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least."

asleep @ 2010-01-17T19:22:00

2010-01-17T18:19:03Z

P.S. The bit that really puzzled us was asking to meet WITHOUT LINDA AND YOKO. I thought you'd have understood BY NOW that I'm JOHNANDYOKO.

asleep @ 2010-01-09T03:33:00

2010-01-09T02:30:34Z

"I like to remember everything. As it was. Because moments by themselves aren't enough; they're just -- they're like photographs. They move a little, they wave, but they aren't everything. You can look back on a moment and say 'In that moment I was happy' or, more often than not, 'In that moment I was uncomfortable' or 'In that moment I was sad' or 'In that moment we were all berks' but you can look back on everything and you think, 'That was good.' Because when all the moments come together, when all the songs meet up with one another, you get something whole and complete and wonderful, people you loved and people you hated and a fondness for them you may not be able to recapture but everything you remember about them being somehow more than they really were, because that's what remembering everything does."

asleep @ 2010-01-08T22:37:00

2010-01-08T21:34:18Z

You are not there. Somewhere in the future, suffering for something that hasn't happened yet. You are not there, in a place where all your worries manifest.

You are not there. Somewhere in the past, reliving your old mistakes and regrets. You are not there, in a place where memories resurrect.

You are here. Right here.

asleep @ 2010-01-07T23:10:00

2010-01-07T22:07:53Z

You don't have to stay anywhere forever.

asleep @ 2010-01-06T18:06:00

2010-01-06T17:04:23Z

Homesickness is just a state of mind for me. I'm always missing someone or someplace or something, I'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing.

asleep @ 2010-01-05T03:53:00

2010-01-05T02:51:03Z

I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.

asleep @ 2010-01-04T15:43:00

2010-01-04T14:42:23Z

It's a human playing a tree. Three chords on a guitar: now write a song. I only know 11! But I tell you what, God help you when i find the 12th!

asleep @ 2009-11-08T21:30:00

2009-11-08T20:31:18Z

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

asleep @ 2009-11-07T17:40:00

2009-11-07T16:40:44Z

The truth of it is, when you hate yourself, there is no better form of punishment than sleeping with people that remind you of yourself. I saw everything that was revolting in myself in these women and was drawn to it like a pig is drawn to its own shit.

asleep @ 2009-10-28T16:13:00

2009-10-28T15:15:07Z

"They think that you're taking advantage of me, they think that I'm using you, but they don't know us. They think that we're ugly, but I know that we're beautiful. And we can adapt to a hostile environment."

asleep @ 2009-10-26T00:14:00

2009-10-25T23:14:11Z

"You know, its interesting you should say that, because I've always wanted a peg leg. It's a boyhood thing I never grew out of. I'm not being flippant, I've given this a lot of thought. I mean, if you have a peg leg or hooks for hands then maybe it's enough to simply keep on living. You know, braving, facing life with your disability. But without these things you're actually meant to make something of your life, achieve something, earn a raise, wear a necktie. So if anything I'm actually the antithesis of Ahab, because if I did have a peg leg I'd quite possibly be more happy and more content not to be chasing after these creatures of the unknown."

asleep @ 2009-10-05T19:21:00

2009-10-05T17:21:28Z

there's a house across the river, but alas, i cannot swim
and a garden of such beauty that the flowers seem to grin
there's a house across the river, but alas, i cannot swim
i'll live my life regretting that i never jumped in

asleep @ 2009-09-16T15:13:00

2009-09-16T13:13:24Z

Don't be afraid of the world. We're just all the people you could've been.

asleep @ 2009-09-05T16:58:00

2009-09-05T14:58:28Z

"You're not a bad person. You're a terrific person. You're my favorite person. But every once in a while, you can be a real cunt."

asleep @ 2009-09-03T22:17:00

2009-09-03T20:40:40Z

So Paris comes and sits down beside me, and I make her a little nervous when I tell her that she's got to listen to this song called "For You". She's afraid I'll be cross if she doesn't like it, or - even worse - that I'll be really furious if she does. I explain that the song is about a girl's fading presence, about "barroom eyes shine vacancy," about someone whose grip on life is so vague that to see her you have to look hard.

That's me, I say to Paris. I'm the girl who's lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away into the background. Just like the Cheshire Cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who looks so very vibrant and shimmery, but who is in fact soon going to be gone. When you look at that picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible, getting covered over more thickly with darkness, coats and coats of darkness that are going to suffocate me in the sweltering heat of the summer sun that I can't even see anymore, even though I can feel it burn.

Imagine, I suggest to Paris, only knowing that the sun is shining because you feel the ache of its awful heat and not because you know the joy of its light. Imagine being always in the dark.

I am going on and on this way to Paris, who is still uneasy, and is not quite sure what to say. You know, I continue, I'd be just like the girl in the song except for one thing. One thing. And that's that he says she's all he ever wanted. He loves her so much. The whole song is about how he's come to take her to the hospital to rescue her from suicide.

I start, as if on cue, to cry. I am so caught up in the idea that nobody would actually try to save me if I were to slit my wrists or hang myself from one of the rafters in the bunk. I can't believe anyone might care enough to try to keep me alive. And then I realize that, yes, of course they would, but only because it is the thing to do. It's not about true caring. It's about not wanting to live with the guilt, the insult, the ugly knowledge that a suicide took place and you did nothing.

[...]

I cry some more and go on and on about how nice it must be to have someone so in love with you they'd sing about the day you died. Paris opens her mouth, probably to say something about how people would like to help, people would like to let me know they care, they just don't know what to do, but I shut her up. I don't want to hear the company line right now. And if anyone ever loved me anough to write such a beautiful song about me, you know I wouldn't kill myself, I continue. In the end I have to think the girl in "For You" is totally crazy because she decided to die when there was so much love for her right here on earth.

asleep @ 2009-08-29T12:49:00

2009-08-29T10:49:29Z

"Everything's gonna be fine. Stay optimistic. If there's dark clouds coming up, they'll leave again. They always do. The world is round. Everything's round. The biggest invention of all times, the wheel is round. Things pass. Nothing will stay the same forever. No matter in how big a pile of shit you've gotten yourself - be it drugs, financial problems, fucked up relations: you'll get over it. It'll go away just like the weather. The sun is round, so is the planet we live on, marriage rings and our eyes through which we see the world."

asleep @ 2009-08-24T21:36:00

2009-08-24T19:36:54Z

"What about, like, when you go on holiday, think, 'Aw, I better go on holiday, cheer meself up, get away from it all. But when you go on holiday... you're there. So it's shit. You can't get away from you. 'Oh, it's me, somewhere a bit different. Great. So I'm just gonna have this, have I, until eventually death.' - 'Yep, that's pretty much the deal!' - 'Thanks. Thanks for that. Glad I signed.' - ''S too late now!'"

asleep @ 2009-08-10T17:05:00

2009-08-10T15:05:34Z

A Chinese emperor once dreamed he was a butterfly. From that day he was never quite sure that he wasn't really just a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese emperor.

asleep @ 2009-08-09T13:46:00

2009-08-09T11:46:07Z

You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

asleep @ 2009-08-08T02:33:00

2009-08-08T00:34:14Z

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

'If they only knew!' I screamed inside. 'If they only knew what I have within me. How much I can pour out, how much I have to say, how much I have inside. If they only knew!'

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, not all that Carrie teenage telekinetic wank, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze, to transform. Yet I was unwanted, rejected and unthought of. My mother, yes, she believed in me, but everybody's mother believes in them. No one else believed in me.

asleep @ 2009-01-15T14:18:00

2009-01-15T13:18:45Z

"I don't mean to sound bitter, cold or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out."