“When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?”
—Don DeLillo, White Noise
(Source: complexity-contradiction, via midnight-in-la)
The clouds preceded us.
There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.
—Wallace Stevens, “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction”
“…I’ve been thinking of how I might engage pendulation—the movement between different kinds of sentences (theory, autobiography and poetry, for example): as between: different parts of the nervous system. An experimental prose form lets me do this. It lets me write about the body in this way. It lets me touch something lightly many times.”
—Bhanu Kapil, from “What is Experimental Literature?”
(Source: proustitute)
NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY
