Walk While Reading

“People say, Well, he wore that body out. Well, maybe I did. But it was to a good purpose. They should be thankful that I wore it out to the purpose I wore it out and that was writing and recording and touring and doing concerts. Everywhere I could possibly do them that I thought I might enjoy them. I thought people might enjoy me.”

-Johnny Cash

“It’s peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with cellphones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games. It robs them of their self-identity. It’s a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that’s got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets.”

-Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone #1078 (14 May 2009), p. 45

” We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say - and to feel - “Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least, thats the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought”“

-John Steinbeck, “In Awe of Words,” The Exonian, 75th Anniversary edition, Exeter University (1930)

Photo Bettmann/Corbis

“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

-Abraham Lincoln

“Let’s not beat around the bush; I love life — that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.”

-Albert Camus, The Fall

[Photo]

“But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”

-The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The long blue days, for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exhausted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day long into hiding. And all the sounds, meaning nothing. Then at night rest in the quiet house, there are no roads, no streets any more, you lie down by a window opening on refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended, and the sky blue again all over the secret places where nobody ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple and indifferent, always mere places, sites of a stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing.”

-Samuel Beckett, Watt. 

“Suttree got up and swung down toward the door but the bus had already started. He hung by one hand swaying. All night he’d tried to see the child’s face in his mind but he could not. All he could remember was the tiny hand in his as they went to the carnival fair and a fleeting image of elf’s eyes wonderstruck at the wide world in it’s wheeling. Where a ferriswheel swung in the night and painted girls were dancing and skyrockets went aloft and broke to shed a harlequin light above the fairgrounds and upturned faces.”

- Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

Side note: I read this passage three days ago and continue to come back to it. I have no idea why.  

Aldous Huxley [art work]