Quotes (444 entries)

As the taxi took me through the city to the station, I felt as though I’d been dropped onto another planet, a cruel and hostile place. Inclined by character to silence and reflection, I’d always been repulsed by noise and uproar, by any manifestation of the excessive merriment that so often borders on violence. I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it.

[The human life] swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.

To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them…

To subject someone to a romantic relationship with me would be immoral.

My completely amateur take is that schizoid is avoidance squared. It is avoidance of avoidance. It is uncomfortable feeling all those things that cause avoidance. Why avoid the things that cause uncomfortable feelings when you can avoid feeling anything at all? And then the veil comes down and you are schizoid. It seems like this happens early for some, late for others, and sometimes not at all, but if you look back far enough, there was usually a time when a schizoid was a pretty sensitive and avoidant looking person.

Didn’t pursue official diagnosis, but it’s quite probable that I used to be avoidant in my teens vs schizoid now. As far as I can remember, avoidant traits were much worse to deal with. It’s much easier to be just indifferent towards interpersonal contact rather than anxious about it.

There is also this conspiracy theory circling around that a burned out AvPD turns into SPD eventually. I think it might be true to some extent.

Suffering when seen as a metaphysical force is just like a perpetual machine. It runs on the fuel that is suffering and generates suffering as the byproduct, which it then uses to fuel itself further and continue the cycle. There maybe some peak and trough in the amount of suffering but suffering can never be fully eradicated. Suffering is self sustaining and is basically like a pantheist “God”. We are all part of it and it and it only exists through our suffering. Suffering is the essence of life, it is the reason for everything we do what we do. Suffering makes us perform actions to relief itself but would then create new forms of suffering as a result. A lion kills and eat a zebra so it may stay alive and procreate to further perpetuate this cycle in an ever increasing scale until the zebra population collapses and the lion population collapses as well. This cycle would then start afresh, it is an endless cycle with no end in sight.

We are all parts that made up of this “God” and it is our suffering that gives “life” to it. What this means for we is that we are created to suffer and perpetuate suffering. All for the manifestation of this “God” into the world. You can only do what is allowed within the limits of being a cog in this ungodly machine and any attempts to fight against the will of this “God” is futile. An end to this metaphysical force is nothing to grieve for indeed.

Perhaps, at least in part, the quest to create an artificial consciousness is part of a longing that comes from the human unconscious. We long for entering into communion with other minds different from our own. We do not want to suffer alone in a high degree of knowledge and for this we are willing to create an artificial consciousness. The same impulse may serve as the basis for those who seek to find other intelligent consciousnesses in the stars, through the discovery of intelligent alien life.

need to wipe, destroy, and start over.

That sort of opposition to being or becoming anything, especially in a social or self-image way, seems to me almost the essential schizoid trait. Sometimes it starts early, sometimes it develops slowly over time. Online or real life contacts, they might end up with similar fates. The moment we decide that it’s not who we are. But it’s not like we know what else we’d be. Not that, I suppose. Or strong associations with negative stuff occurs, like a bad smell.

It can be kind of interesting to see this opposition in so many ways looking back. Not always in obvious ways. It’s not like schizoids only find themselves to be empty or (desiring) nothing, it can be just as well the active undoing of whatever is forming. To start existing even in the most superfluous ways, becomes terrible, boring or just too fake.

I think being schizoid is like playing life in hard mode. You don’t belong but you have to play along. It’s tiresome to have to just observe human life, not being able to really participate, it’s like being forced to watch someone eat a delicious looking cake and not getting to taste it, ever. And despite not maybe always feeling like it, schizoids are human too. Humans are hard-wired to be social animals, it is in our genetics. Whether you enjoy socializing or not, it is good for your cognitive and even physical health.

And emotions are what motivates all action, whether you realize it or not. That’s the very purpose why we evolved to have emotions, to motivate us so we would survive. Avolition and anhedonia are destructive, they are a disturbance in the human drive to do things that are important, basically they hinder your ability to lead a good life. You also need motivation to do stuff like graduate and hold a job, which are needed for getting money, without which you cannot get insurances or anything else. Schizoids have the lowest life success rate of all personality disorders.

But of course some are more high functioning than others, basically some people here have the disorder and some have the personality type, I think. You have a personality disorder only when it causes suffering for you. If someone doesn’t mind their schizoid traits and they are able to function fairly well then it’s not a personality disorder but a personality style, and I’m speaking of the former here.

Schizoids are somewhat in a unique place as far as personality disorders go. We are inward facing, self-validating, self-reliant (on thinking through things, not always financially or housing), etc.

So, we frame the world, usually, as if everyone else is or should be this as well. To us, this is ’the norm’—and we literally cannot gain something good, or new, from interactions. We don’t need to interact with someone to validate an experience, or ’move on’ from some emotional attachment or slight.

However, normal people do not exist like this at all. Ever. Not even a little. Not for even a handful of minutes a year.

They are always outward facing in searching for validation. They feel they have no value, unless it’s measured by, or against someone else. Their emotions literally exist only as a function of social validation, or as an attachment to others. If they are mad, they are mad at someone. If they’re sad, they need to process it with others, and reference stability and coping mechanism off the ’other’… they cannot do this on their own.

That’s why virtually everyone that goes to therapy, goes to deal with their emotions, and the severe control emotions have over their actions.

That’s why a schizoid often gets nothing from most therapists, it’s not emotions for us, we’re stuck internally, conscious, and intellectualizing emotions away if they do happen, or forcing them to appear when we lack them. Hyper-aware of this, usually.

Other. People. Never. Do.

So they’re reaching out to process and connect—they’re unfulfilled, or some door isn’t closed, and they feel an internal emotional sense that they ’must’—some how, reference off you to complete the task.

To you, that’s nonsense.

I mean, I’m saying it in an extreme way, and one can argue it’s not always like this—and it’s not.

But go read what ’mindfulness’ is—the thing where people struggle to do it even a few minutes a day, after months of trying, on purpose, and tell me—if, to you, that sounds like horse shit, because it’s describing a state you’re in 99 percent of the time as default.

That’s what I mean.

God handed me the fruits of his creation, then took my taste.

Hope is expectation coupled with fear that something will not work out. As such it is almost the opposite of pessimism. Pessimism is about abandoning hope and expecting the worst, which is often closer to the truth.

Hopium is very bad for you in general because it’s unstable, depends on imagination and ambition, therefore making you anxious. Be realistic and apply reason, not hope.

The risks we take during life to ultimately not suffer are due to the original imposition done upon us in birth. Whoever you want to blame, be it your parents, ancestors, or god, someone created you into a life where you must impose to limit suffering.

I suppose one could argue that being a parent could also be necessary to achieve happiness in many cases, but this is a Ponzi scheme sort of arrangement.

I think I have postpartum depression. It started right after I was born.

I get a similar sentiment whenever I come across popular “self-improvement” content. I’ve never bought any promises that I could ever better my life or progress in any real sense, for no matter what I achieve, I will always be striving. I don’t get inspired whenever I see someone struggle really hard for wealth, influence, a big muscly body, a romantic relationship, or some other insipid marker of success.

I see a futility in these attmepts to attain “fulfilment” or the “good life”, a bit like the futility of treading water. You swing your arms and kick your legs to stay afloat, just so you’re able to breathe for a moment longer. However, no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to get out of the water. You’re always sinking so to stay above water, you have to expend effort over and over and over again until you’ve got none left to expend.

I see all pursuits for fulfilment in this sort of image; we are always lacking something. Living to try and satisfy all your desires is a game that you can only ever lose because for every desire that one satisfies, another shall show up in its place. Now, realizing this probably won’t fix the pain associated with not achieving your desires but it might help alleviate feelings of self-hatred or guilt for having a “bad life”. After all, there’s no need to feel bad about yourself for losing a game that was impossible to win all along.

Defeatism is just a term society use to gaslight people into conforming with social expectations. You could very well be considered a defeatist in a capitalist society by embracing minimalism. There is no such thing as a defeatist in absolute terms. This term solely exist to shame and guilt trap people to fall in line with what is expected of them. It is also a relativistic term that requires a specific setting for the term to have a meaning. You might be considered a defeatist in capitalistic society by giving up on the rat race and becoming a minimalist. But on the other hand, you are an “optimist” within the minimalist community.

There is no such thing as “give up”. Even embracing nothingness requires effort. Activities that induces a sense of liberation such as meditation actually requires putting effort to work. Therefore, it is nothing but gaslighting to say one is a defeatist when one decide to go on a path of liberation rather than participate in the rat race. The word defeatism is designed to keep people trapped in a cycle of endless suffering. It is done by holding onto the idea that there is some kind of reward waiting for them at the end when they eventually “win” at whatever they are doing.

This is how people today justify suffering of people when industrial revolution began, “it was worth it because we now have a fridge, medicine and technology.”

This is how now people are justifying suffering of people today, “it’s worth it because we will reduce even more suffering with additional technology”

The problem with that line of thought is that it presupposes an end to our misery, that technology will bring salvation and create Utopia.

What those same people don’t get is that suffering is fundamentally ontological to humans and everything around us.

Hypothetically even if we managed to cure every disease, every mental health ’problem’, everything being automated, upload our consciousness to machines etc…

After all of that, the questions people very like to ignore is this: what after that?

A sterilized society devoid of pain will only bring boredom and boredom eventually turns into suffering and we are back to square one: how to reach salvation of existence?

People ultimately read books, play video games, watch fiction etc… Because they suffer. They engross themselves as a fictional spectator to forget about their personal life predicament thus unawarely denying Will to Life and affirming non existence periodically to lessen their suffering.

I think striving for happiness is like chasing the dragon

[…] When I was truly happy was when I was a child. When I was ignorant of the world and what horrors it contained. Something you can never go back to. […]

There’s a moment when the intelligent empath, perhaps born with a melancholic bent, realises they are stuck in a kind of mortal reality show of endless suffering.

They look out at the sunset over a peaceful lake, only to see a pelican swoop down and grab up a fish, swallowing the fish whole as it visibly flaps around, trying to resist its awful fate.

Then the thinking empath reflects on how cruel and unfair the natural state of things is, and that they themselves are stuck inside the cruelty fishbowl and will most likely suffer their own grizzly decline.

I remember as a child of eight or nine years old, sitting in the bathtub weeping at how much suffering the world contains, and how little protection against it we have. It must have been when my first grasp on death and the nature of things occurred.

One must know that things also become dull. Stale.

What i think will make me happy today, may not have that same impact next week.

Be critical of those who paint vice in nostalgic light, or you’ll normalize confinement, and call it home.

[…] The reason you’re unhappy isn’t a lack of working on yourself, that’s something people tell you on Reddit to feel better about themselves. Plenty of fat ass motherfuckers are out there living their best lives, there are monsters that get married and built a beautiful family, ugly guys that get laid every day…

Working on yourself is great if that’s what you want, but do not fool yourself. The reason our lives suck isn’t superficial, self-help bs. It’s something deeply wrong in our brains.

*Watching a scenery IRL*

Pia: It’s like something from a painting.

Davis: That’s because people paint landscapes.

In his “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” which was written in 1937, two years before his death, Freud expresses his deep frustration with the futility of the therapeutic attempts to cure self-destructive tendencies, “In no phase of one’s analytic work does one suffer more from the oppressive feeling that all one’s efforts have been in vain and from the suspicion that one is ‘talking to the winds’” (p. 404) The death drive reveals itself as incurable, it is a constitutive obstacle beyond which therapy is not capable of progressing. One can say that since the curse of the negative psychoanalytic insight, psychoanalysis has functioned as a breakdown of itself. It is a disappointment, a negation and rejection and a failure of itself. Psychoanalysis has thus become negative, an empty, meaningless husk—the living dead.

The negative insight undermines psychoanalysis from within. Like a black sun that shines with darkness instead of light and, with this, dismisses its essence. A practical therapeutic dimension of psychoanalysis is its outer shell that remains from its original positive framework. As long as psychoanalysis maintains functioning in its therapeutic dimension, it betrays its negative insight and inner breakage, making the psychoanalyst a fraud. The psychoanalyst, in this case, is like a priest who lost his faith in God and fell into deep despair but still preaches, attending to the demand of the parish.

This internal breakdown can be considered a defeat of psychoanalysis, its failure, and its disability. From this, one might conclude that psychoanalysis should be relegated to the basement of history as a failed project, Freud should be declared a charlatan, and that various more empirically validated methods of comprehension and treatments that really help should now rightfully declare their victory over psychoanalysis, or that psychoanalysis has to be fixed, for example, by combining it with modern research. Such attempts have been made many times.

However, to me, this inner breakdown of psychoanalysis, its internal tragedy, which many adherents of psychoanalysis, including Freud himself, try to cover up, is the dearest in psychoanalysis. In this tragedy of the impossibility of psychoanalysis, in its curse, one can feel something painfully dear, absurd, and therefore sincerely human, and for the same reason, unbearable and repulsive. Perhaps in this personal tragedy of Freud and the tragedy of the breakdown of psychoanalysis, in their wretchedness, they coincide the most with the more profound deep pathetic and tragic truth about each of us. In this rupture with itself, psychoanalysis coincides with us, with our inner rupture, and with the inner rupture of the world.

Plunging into a black night of its soul, it meets the soul of each of us since the darkness of the soul is the only thing we genuinely hold in common. Our internal breakdown, brokenness, malfunction, tragedy, and absurdity encounter who we most genuinely are. This psychoanalysis coincides with life as such, as something doomed to failure and, in its essence, is nothing but a failure.

I’m unclear as to why self-worth is necessary or meaningful. If you need to engage in self-delusion to delude yourself into believing in another delusion, you are probably better off with just dropping all of it.

Some of that discouragement for me (ed. in advocating) comes from seeing this world lacking in a plethora of metacognitive skills. Even the institutions themselves that discuss mental health – papers, researchers, those that present themselves as being scientifically minded, unbiased, and focus entirely on a description of the nature of certain things regarding mental health and neurodivergency – are constantly lacking so much metacognition that the very papers, the very pieces of research I read make that very apparent. And the people doing such work in the therapeutic world and otherwise don’t have any idea it’s happening. They don’t even know. So much so that I’ve seen forms of therapy that are attempting to instill metacognition in many of those that suffer with psychosis and many of those that are considered schizo-spectrum… When metacognition is the reason those people are sometimes crippled, mentally crippled by the world that they inhabit. But still, they try to produce more of it, only in a direction that would make them more functional, more available, more compliant to a society that they already oftentimes perceive as being run by mad men, and supported by cowardice, fear, death, fear of worthlessness, fear of invalidation. And in name of those things, the banality of evil grows and grows and grows.

Too much ignorance, and we have absolutely no respect for the potential for suffering that exists here. We are far more likely to shoot ourselves in the foot (so to speak), cause others as well as ourselves more pain than we ever thought possible, only to eventually decay and die.

Too little ignorance, and you become completely frozen by fear. You fully recognize the fragility of your body, the consciousness resting in it, and the fragility of all individual life forms.

[…]

A certain level of solipsism is required for a decent quality of life. A certain level of ignorance and delusion are required for a decent quality of life.

[…]

The sweet-spot of delusion. That’s where it’s at.

[…]

Meditation has helped me in very gradually lifting the veil of safety/security. And then psychedelics rip the veil off of your face all at once and it’s just WAY too much. We are biologically programmed to be reproducing machines, and there are many mechanisms in place that keep us from completely losing our very complex human minds.

Welcome to right wing America, where if you want to end a young life, you have to shoot them.

These are the kind of people who live on the edge of life, so to speak, who are thrown into uncharted waters by their melancholy, and somehow manage to find the surface right before they are lost to the high tides. Anyone who has gone through debilitating bouts of depression knows what the feeling is like: you stand at the cliff of a mountain and gaze right into the abyss, whose gravitas is irresistible. During those times, it really helps to have something; anything at all to grab onto – your job, your spouse, a family member, a promise made to someone, even a pet. As the years pass, however, you start to lose those things, everything feels old, repetitive, and it is not the case for melancholics to be friendly or even easy to be around to keep relationships. This results in the loss of personal meaning, and the fundamental truth of life hits the hardest when personal meaning is non-existent, for there is no cosmic one. The abyss pulls you in; you wade into the cold, uncharted waters, lost in its deep oblivion. This, to me, is suicide par excellence, and only a very contemplative few get to carry it out.

For people with social anxiety disorder, everyday social interactions cause irrational anxiety, fear, self-consciousness, and embarrassment.

Also a lot of people will tell you to just fake it/force it and it will became real, which is bs. The only real thing that can help is to find what you are good at, and what you enjoy and follow that path.

But finding what you are good/enjoy is another challenge in of itself.

What really busts my balls is the cheerfulness of morning radio shows.

Things change faster and faster and we keep keeping up because we are afraid to die.

[young people] went out there to stop discrimination – not all discrimination, just some of it… Which is a weird form of discrimination, but…

It’s like when you have a toothache and you curse yourself for all the times you felt fine and didn’t fully appreciate how great it was not to have a toothache, and you promise yourself that if there’s ever another day in your life when you don’t have a toothache, you’ll spend at least half of every day you have left reflecting on how great it is not to have a toothache, and you certainly won’t complain about stupid things anymore, like, I don’t know, noisy neighbors or not being able to find a parking space – my God, how wonderful it is to not find a parking space without a toothache!

The principle of sympathy for intense suffering (ed. that is, the alleviation of intense suffering has moral priority over everything else) defended here stems neither from depression nor resentment. Rather, as the name implies, it simply stems from a deep sympathy for intense suffering. It stems from a firm choice to side with the evaluations of those who are superlatively worst off. And while it is true that this principle has the implication that it would have been better if the world had never existed, I think the fault here is to be found in the world, not the principle.

I just… I just cannot believe this is it. This is life. There is no magical third act where I am the star in some fantasy adventure. I won’t suddenly gain superpowers and fight cartoonish villains. This is it. This is all it will ever be. The rest of my life, quiet and drab. Our one shot at consciousness is spent on something so unimaginably boring. My curse of sentience is spent wageslaving, consuming media, messing around with hobbies that will never fill the void, shitting, cleaning. That’s all it will ever be. Sad and pathetic.

They make it sound as if women give you who knows what… It’s something that lasts five minutes. Among other things: the pleasure does not last long, the effort is big, and the position is ridiculous.

But what happens if your parents grew up in a home where there was a lot of rage, your parents are terrified of rage, so they give you the message that good little girls don’t get angry. The message that you get is that angry little girls don’t get loved. So, to maintain your relationship with your parents, then you – not consciously, but automatically – your brain will repress anger in order to maintain the relationship with parents who can’t handle your anger. Because maintaining that relationship is the only way to ensure your survival. It’s been shown in studies after studies that repression of anger also represses the immune system, so you get e.g. colitis.

Because the two systems are part of the same supersystem, and because healty anger and the immune system have the same function, which is to protect you. So suppressing your self-protection in one way is suppressing it in another way as well, and that same system will then turn against you, and now you get an autoimmune disease.

The emotional repression disorganizes the immune system.

– You’re a nymphomaniac. […] When I was young, I was like you. […] I’d just think about sex, all the time.

– Yes? And you fucked all the girls?

– I tried.

– But?

– I didn’t fuck all of them because it’s difficult for a man. But for the woman it’s more easy (sic): you can fuck everyone. Right?

– Yes. –, and she laughs.

Once again, the children of the core think to change the inevitable. They do not see the truth, the futility of their actions. We bring purity to chaos, serenity to bedlam. All will be consumed. This is necessary and good. The children do not understand. The children believe their lives worth living.

The children are wrong. The worlds and the core of the worlds live in pain, agony, discord. We bring peace. Equality. Silence.

All are one within our embrace. The children resist what cannot be resisted. They fight a battle that cannot be won. Their actions are ultimately irrelevant. No matter how many times they rise, they will be destroyed. Their time is over. We will consume all.

The percentage of introverts varies depending on the statistics: in the absence of a clear definition of what it means to be introverted, estimates range from 5% to 25% – the latter figure being supported by American researchers. The 5-7% estimate proposed in my book “Timido, docile, ardente…” wasn’t based on formal studies, but rather on my own observations in elementary schools, where the introverted child – easily recognizable at a glance – tends to be, on average, 1 in every 15 to 20 students. Today, I would be inclined to widen that range to 5-10%.

That introversion has a genetic basis – whose positive or negative developments depend on environmental influences – seems to me beyond doubt, given not only the behavioral traits observable early on, but especially the inner experiences (empathy, sense of justice, aesthetic sensitivity, etc.): these – both the traits and the experiences – are consequences of neoteny, which is, in absolute terms, the most defining feature of introversion.

Genetics is an extremely complex science and susceptible to ideological “aberrations”. With regard to introversion, what seems certain is that there is no single introversion gene, but rather a constellation of genes – dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands – present in the parental genetic makeup and “extracted” as a result of their combination. In parents, these genes may be evident as personality traits or masked by the dominance of extroverted genes.
Once extracted and variously combined, they give rise to the introverted mode of being.

Artists are expensive because they do drugs and have to deal with costly divorces.

[…]

>>174236
Secrets are all too easy to deal with. Skeletons in the closet are easy to hide.
It’s when your entire being itself is a secret, that’s when interacting with people becomes complex and difficult, painful even.

I’ve noticed that so much of genuine social interaction rests on sharing experiences. Technical discussion is a kin to small talk and fails to bridge a gap between people and form a connection. It’s about seeing a reflection of yourself in your environment, seeing that a shared reality exists between you and another being, that’s what truly quenches loneliness.

The usual normalfag advice of “just be yourself” seems so appropriate now.
It’s possibly all they’ve ever known.

[…]
But try to look at it with full honesty, without bias: the closer you look at yourself and the actual course of your life, the more you realize the objective fact: you were the Rain Man retard. And all your imaginary lives are delusional fantasies.

There wasn’t a point in your timeline where you were ever close into turning into a functional life.

– […] I’d say you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives: we drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job… or the happy marriage. But these aren’t decisions, they’re… they’re impulses. In fact, you’re probably better equipped to explain this than I am.

– What does that mean?

– You’re a biologist. Isn’t self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?

whatever question you’re asking yourself, the answer is that you’re not in control, so ride the wave but be ready to swim

Luciano had become so used to being alone and living cocooned in his hermitage that seeing a psychologist would have been unthinkable: you cannot conceive of solving a problem if the problem is all you have. It’s easier to lie down inside your own noise and sing something stupid over it when possible. And so, some days, for Luciano it could almost feel like happiness, even with a hint of pride, in the awareness that no one was trying to make him feel better except himself.

I believe that we do not die because we fall ill, but we fall ill because we must die.

Depression is like reverse cancer: there’s so little you want to do, but you have so much time left.

– What’s so bad about being a pig?

– It’s undignified.

– Undignified?

– Walking about with your nose the same height as your asshole.

– Snout.

– What’s that?

– Pigs have snouts, not noses. So it would be your snout the same height as your asshole.

– Nose, snout… You’re still trotting about gazing up everybody else’s assholes all day long. What kind of society is that?

– An equal one?

It’s like with human life: if you’re lucky enough to reach old age, the phases of your life will be: birth, childhood, puberty, masturbation, masturbation with a partner, pathetic attempts at masturbation, and death.

[…] men are stones; they do not change.

The superego is a structure soluble in alcohol.

The first meeting with Alcoholics Anonymous unsettles you not because they are alcoholics, but because they are anonymous.

– What I mean is that some people are born to suffer, and if they’re made to suffer, it doesn’t matter because it’s what they were born for.

– That’s horrible.

– The world is horrible; the human being is horrible; but we can’t run away from it, because we are the horror. You have to accept it.

Life is unpredictable and control is just an illusion.

Exclusion from the sphere of labor equates to social insignificance.

– Do you smoke a lot?

– As much as I can. As much as I can. I don’t even keep track. Whatever… I won’t die healthy, but it’s hard to die healthy. What really hurts is living, because by the sheer act of living, we die.

[…] Maybe life is better enjoyed when we forget we even have one? […]

Every singer, poet, or writer has ninety-nine “love” at their disposal, after which they die.

– No one really likes what they do.

– Then why do we do it?

– Because we’re driven. Maybe a bit insecure. We get into things when we’re young and because we think they mean something.

– And then we find out that they don’t.

– Oh, Susan, enjoy the absurdity of our world (ed. contemporary art business). It’s a lot less painful. And believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world.

There is no freedom/choice/option of an instant/painless/effortless/guaranteed/permanent way out of life (and existence), therefore, life (and existence) is prison/torture/slavery/rape, and therefore, life (and existence) is survival of the stupidest.

Picky eaters, they grow up to be depressives and sexual anorexics, you know.

– There’s a common, sentimental notion that angels are all around us, solving little domestic problems. But in the Bible, when humans encounter an angel, they fall to their knees in fear. These are beings of tremendous power. Think of the first renegade angels, in league with Lucifer. They were strong enough to challenge God. And surely, God…

[…]

God actually created these rogue angels, knowing that they would defy Him, because what was the end result of this defiance?

The police superintendent: – Lucifer came to Earth in the guise of a serpent.

– Very good…

[…]

And what did we gain from that famous snake? Knowledge, free will, the ability to think for ourselves, which led to everything you see now in this room: civilization, art, culture, music… life. In some strange way, these rogue angels were the architects of all that we hold dear.

The true, only problem, is not having the aptitude for suicide.

Another aspect of escapism is that it is an addiction.
Like junkies, we need ever higher doses and at one point there simply isn’t enough left, so we end up looking at the same shit over and over again desperately trying to remember how it was like when we first saw it, but by then it no longer satisfies.
[…]

Boredom is the real problem of men; humans can bear next to anything when they are distracted, and most of our activities are steered towards that goal.

What does it mean – and I close with this somewhat pedagogical note – what does it mean to “anticipate death”? That is, to be persuaded that one must die; what is the advantage of the tragic dimension?, which consists in the fact that you have to die and there is nothing waiting for you in the afterlife? The advantage is that you work a relativization of the problems of the now. You don’t rush like a desperate man, you don’t argue like a madman. You don’t kill yourself for the worries of the world, because you are mortal; you are mortal, and when you have to retire you don’t despair, you don’t die two years after: because death is still there waiting for you, it’s not as if life ends: you’re the one who made it coincide with your work life and outside that you no longer know who you are. Because by now our identities are assigned by our social roles, right? We know who we are only because others recognize us in a role, outside that we no longer know who we are; and indeed all actors and actresses lead tragic lives, why is that? Because they didn’t anticipated death, because they didn’t assumed it as a condition… like a thickness of the soul, here – let’s use this word even if it refers to an entity that does not exist, the soul indeed.

But let’s keep this anticipation in mind, because by relativizing things we stop those typical dramas of those who believe in the immortality of the soul and therefore believe that this life has its own importance, their Ego becomes hegemonic and what depends on the Ego decides life and death; a love ends, and women are killed because it’s all over: no, no, no, stop. If you internalize death in advance then you relativize all things, and all things don’t have that thickness of despair anymore (despair, not tragedy). But who are these desperate people? Those who had hope. Because those who never had hope, never despair.

I don’t want to tell you clichés like “be yourself”, because it’s clear that if you’re an idiot, being yourself won’t help you.

Living with a woman is like sharing a bed with the CIA: nothing is secret.

Animals live without feeling the least need of justification, as do the crushing majority of men. They live because they live, and then I suppose they die because they die, and for them that’s all there is to it.

I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows – every researcher, every writer, every spy.

Music is my friend. Understanding, empathic. Forgiving, comforter. A towel to dry tears of sadness. A source for tears of happiness. Liberation and flight. But also a painful thorn. In flesh and soul.

When I said to him: “Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?”

And he said, “Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied.”

It’s not that old people are wise: they just have a very low dose of sexuality and aggressiveness – that’s it. And at this level they are also calm, unless they have a bad temper.

– I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it’s obviously my programming. And I lack the constitution for suicide.

– So, tell me. Why do you want to kill yourself so badly? Mummy and daddy, they didn’t love you enough?

– No, it had nothing to do with anything like that.

– It has everything to do with “anything like that”.

For me, the greatest Bach player of all time. He works only on the total sadness of Bach. Bringing in full light the absolute despair of Bach. And with such elegance! Strange and mourning voices in the darkness. Inviting you to their dark evening.

No “thumb down” and so goes further this holy way to express Bach, and further the ultimate singing of Feinberg, oh the nightly climax between 2:24 and 2:44… this is beyond my own possible emotional capacity… and the last lights at about 5:33… ade… ade… and the last chord at 6:36, not to be commented…

Last week, I was in the hospital for another surgery.
Upon me, before and after the operation, I saw faces. I heard voices. Looking at me, talking to me.
And this evening, listening to this music, I understand all of it.
Ill or not, young or old, all these persons, kind nurses, charming anesthetist, competent doctors, royal surgeon, all of them, all of them, with no exception, faced also their terrible destiny, on the Titanic of earthly life… Their eyes are full of love and anguish, in a pathetic mix between life and death.

I came home now, bleeding and suffering, in the tiny hope of a good convalescence, and I listen to Feinberg’s Bach.
He is not an Angel, but he speaks for all of us.
In his hands, our destinies. Pain and sorrow, love, kisses, incandescent lips of desire, and always these dark evenings, and sudden lights, all together.
A complete life.
Bach knew it, Feinberg knows it, all these faces, these smiles, these eyes full of sadness and hope, all of us… all of us…

After all, society was not prepared to accept people like us who had different life needs, who wanted to be in company but wanted to be alone, who wanted money but didn’t want it, who were a total contradiction, of life, of their id.

– No, I don’t believe that bad people exist; I believe that various forms of desperation exist. Some of these forms are so intense that the person who is suffering from them becomes the perpetrator of their own crimes, but not the mastermind. They find themselves committing a crime with astonishment.

Money doesn’t buy you happiness, it just buys you a lot of therapy to talk about why you’re not happy.

What we should do is take all the mentally defective people in this country and give them government jobs, and just sit back and watch things improve.

To this question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer: “Pussy.” Whereas I answered “The smell of old people’s houses.” The question was “What do you really like the most in life?” I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.

This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life, hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world. Blah, blah, blah, blah… Beyond there is what lies beyond. I don’t deal with what lies beyond. Therefore, let this novel begin. After all, it’s just a trick. Yes, it’s just a trick.

And if you don’t win [at the slot machines], try asking yourself a question: if you were lucky, do you really think you’d be working in a call center?

All right, look, man, I’m cashing in. I’m done. I’m 40 shit years old, I got nothing, I got nobody. And I don’t want anything, I don’t want anybody; and that’s the worst part: when the want goes. That’s… that’s bad. I mean, like, suffering is one thing, or “not having” is one thing… But when you just don’t care anymore?

You know, I’ve gone soft in the last three pussies I’ve been in. You get to a point where you go “Maybe it’s time to just put a period at the end of my… whatever this was.”

There are many ways of dying; the worst of them is to continue living.

Love is two weeks of happiness, two months of arguing and two years of recovering.

– No, no, you’ll have a thousand nights like this one. You won’t remember this. Everything will be forgotten.

– Everything?

– Everything.

– Why’s that?

– It’s sort of a natural… A law of nature.

– A rule?

– Yeah.

– It’s the only theme. The passing of time.

– You’re young and still think there’s something out there, floating… that resembles dreams. And there isn’t.

[…]

Let’s not discuss tastes. How could we ever understand each other? It’s like a 17th century knight meeting a rock singer. Young people like impossible things. And older people, the simplest. It’s like flying: when you’re young, you think you can fly. That your car just flies away. Flies away, I don’t know… from this country, from this bathroom, from this world. The whole point of fucking you was to fly with your wings… fly a little while. To get a little taste of youth.

[…]

– Real politicians make me sick. They deceive people.

– You think people want to know the truth. They’d rather be deceived.

– You can’t be happy if you don’t lie to yourself?

As for music being a comforting thing in times such as these, I’m sure it is for those who aren’t too depressed to still enjoy it. But music can’t compare with alcohol or drugs, which directly affect one’s emotional state as opposed to music’s indirect effect through our sense of hearing and never fail to provide an escape. Like literature, music is just a harmless form of forgetting the world and doesn’t always work as well as we’d like.

How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

Only one. But it takes a lot of time and money, and the bulb has got to really want to change.

The park is now empty and bare[🡕], with an abandoned chain about it. The jungle gym, the slide and swing have rusted together. They’re all so terribly alone now. Where did all the children go? Didn’t they know that the park needed them?

A child’s intelligent heart can fathom the depth of many dark places. But can it fathom the delicate moment of its own detachment?

I realized something today. I’m a non-person, Sarah. You shouldn’t be here. I’m not here. You may see me, but I’m hollow.

When you’re walking down the hallway, or in class, how many of you have ever felt the weight pressing down on you? Hmm? I have. Everyone? Wow. Poe wrote about these things over a hundred years ago. So, as we read, we can see that “The House of Usher” is not merely an old decrepit castle in disrepair. It’s also a state of being.

«During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I looked upon the simple landscape of the domain – upon the bleak walls – upon the white trunks of decayed trees – with an utter depression of soul. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart.»

You can imagine, a seventeen-year-old, it’s the age when one fights furiously with their father, even now, and they fought furiously back then too (ed. in the Middle Ages), as in every era, at that age.

This is a strange, rather perverse, story, just to put it in very simple terms. It’s a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.

– It seems that the only happy people in this movie by the end, are slightly crazy, and they are the course of future Mr. and Mrs. Wunch – a lovely name – and they’re the ones who don’t believe that you may even need happiness in the present life. So, everyone else seems to be left miserable, and I’m curious if this is if you are being playful with this, or if this is a serious comic commentary on what life looks to you at this point.

– This is my perspective, and has always been my perspective on life. I have a very grim pessimistic view of it; I always have, since I was a little boy, it hasn’t gotten worse with age or anything: I do feel that it’s a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies, and deceive yourself. And I’m not the first person to say this or the most articulate person on it: it was said by Nietzsche, it was said by Freud, it was said by Eugene O’Neill… One must have one’s delusions to live: if you look at life too honestly and clearly, life does become unbearable because it’s a pretty grim enterprise, you will admit. So, I do feel that those two people are the only two people that are happy: they are capable of deluding themselves; if I saw them at a party in real life I would think that they were foolish people, and dumb, and silly, and I would laugh at them, but they would be happier than me. So that is the way I feel about it.

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.

Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.

If you believe everything you read, you better not read.

It takes two to have a child, but you think alone.

Youth is beauty and beauty is youth. And that’s all you need to know.

Nature is Satan’s church.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

It’s really not that hard to understand people: you just have to not listen to them and “look” at their appearance.

I am a guy with “covert” Schizoid Personality Disorder. That is, I don’t give a damn about people and prefer to stay alone and self-sufficient but I fake extroversion to get by.

[…]

Problem is, I also like to accomplish stuff (entirely for my own sense of internal satisfaction) and I need other people to do that. So I fake extroversion and interest in other people even if I don’t give a fuck. This actually exacerbates my pre-existing sense of existential isolation, since it shows how easily people can be handled.

I have been defined as “bubbly” and “charismatic”. Absurd.

[…]

deep down I actually feel a desperate need for love and friendship

Hahaha…oh, no you don’t, you only think you do. You’ll eventually just be disappointed/bored by it if you do find it, and discard it like every other social function you have encountered. I’m sure you have already tossed potential friendships away simply because you became uninterested after a few days/weeks, so you know what I mean.

What I think that people like us are actually feeling, is the hollowness of our egocentric fantasies which we wrap our minds in. Our ideal level of emotional interaction is so completely removed from reality that it is literally unobtainable. I think that intellectually we realize this, so it causes some angst, if only because we think that we will likely never be able to fulfill our fantasy.

You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your mommy, your daddy, your nature pajamas. You love everything, don’t ya? Yeah. But you know what, buddy? As you get older… some of the things that you love might not seem so special anymore, you know? Like your jack-in-the-box. Maybe you’ll realize it’s just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal… And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it’s only one or two things. With me, I think it’s one.

Often, journalists or even in casual conversations, I have been asked the question: why do you write? Normally, I answer, and it is the truth, that there are two reasons of great importance. The first has to do with the need not to have a boss. The second, not to get up early. I think everyone would agree that these are not only important things but also, in general, difficult to achieve.

– That was amazing. I wish I could play.

– Take lessons. You’d enjoy playing. If you knew more, you wouldn’t have such a high opinion of my playing.

– What do you see?

– Animals.

– Prisoners, held in a cage like us in a world without risk, or struggle, or danger. The only difference is that they are able to see the bars, and that takes away any hope of escape.

If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.

– The ceiling is probably the last thing people see. At least for 90% of the people who die. Probably. And if you die, the last thing you see will be printed in your eye. Like a photograph. Imagine all those people with ceilings in their eyes.

There were only two or three of us in Rome who considered climbing not just a hobby, but a job: to set off, to become obsessed with a wall of rock, to feel, before every attempt, the Route looming above you in an oppressive way, to feel anxiety rising uncontrollably, to fall asleep with the Route in your head, to alternate periods of nervous insomnia with periods of morbid drowsiness, to wake up with the Route still in your head, to deprive yourself of something, and to suffer, even if that something, or that suffering, is not necessarily connected to performance. It’s just that it’s written in the laws of the universe that to obtain, you must suffer, even if suffering does not necessarily mean you will obtain anything. So, you seek suffering, because it pricks you, awakens you, activates you, and at times breaks that opaque glass that almost always stands between you and reality; it makes you feel, at least sometimes, that you’re alive, and sometimes feeling alive is more important than feeling good. Serenity can be sacrificed in honor of life itself, if only to avoid falling back into that horrible nirvanic anesthesia.

You know, Kyon… have you ever realized just how insignificant your existence on this planet really is? […] It happened to me. And I’ll never forget it. Back when I was in the sixth grade, my whole family went out to go watch a baseball game at the stadium. I didn’t really care about baseball, but I was surprised by what I saw when we got there. Everywhere I looked, I saw people. On the other side of the stadium, the people looked so small, like little moving grains of rice. It was so crowded. I thought that everyone in Japan had to be packed in there.

So I turned to my dad and asked him, “Do you know how many people are here right now”? He said since the stadium was full, probably fifty thousand. After the game, the street was filled with people and I was really shocked to see that, too. To me, it seemed like there was a ton of people there. But then, I realized it could only be a tiny fraction of all the people in Japan. When I got home, I pulled out my calculator. In social studies, I’d learned that the population of Japan was a hundred some odd million. So I divided that by fifty thousand. The answer was one two-thousandth. That shocked me even more. I was only one little person in that big crowded stadium filled with people, and believe me, there were so many people there, but it was just a handful of the entire population.

Up till then, I always thought that I was, I don’t know, kind of a special person. It was fun to be with my family. I had fun with my classmates. And the school that I was going to, it had just about the most interesting people anywhere. But that night, I realized it wasn’t true. All the stuff we did during class that I thought was so fun and cool, was probably happening just like that in classes in other schools all over Japan. There was nothing special about my school at all. When I realized that, it suddenly felt like the whole world around me started to fade into a dull gray void. Brushing my teeth and going to sleep at night, waking up and eating breakfast in the morning, that stuff happened all over the place. They were everyday things that everybody was doing. When I thought about it like that, everything became boring. If there’s really that many people in the world, then there had to be someone who wasn’t ordinary. There had to be someone who was living an interesting life. There just had to be. But why wasn’t I that person? So, that’s how I felt till I finished elementary school.

And then I had another realization. I realized fun things wouldn’t come my way just by waiting for them. I thought when I got into junior high, it was time for me to make a change. I’d let the world know I wasn’t a girl who was happy sitting around waiting. And I’ve done my best to become that person. But in the end, nothing happened. More time went by and before I knew it, I was in high school. I thought that something would change.

I think everybody should get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that that’s not the answer.

I’ve often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame, so that they could see that it’s not where you’re going to find your sense of completion.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

– Do you still ask God for help?

– Certainly.

– And do you still feel lonely?

– Yes, I still do. I still do.

– Isn’t that really sad?

– Yes, that’s really sad.
But so is my life.

No matter what one does, there is never enough time.

Civilization has no appeal to me. The Eastern Peoples seem to live their lives more sensibly. Because they don’t have such distant goals as us, the white brotherhood. The East is… «If you are moving, then you are on the right path.» While for us, the path doesn’t matter – only reaching the goal. I want to go to the East, because there I will feel well. I’ll be able to enter the Present time.

The point is – to stop thinking. These days, we have too much information about everything. Internet, TV, radio… You can find out what goes on in the States at any given point.

For me drugs aren’t a specific substance: they’re anything that you’re addicted to. When you lose what you’ve been addicted to, you have to accept something different. I’ve accepted that all these “gods” we have, they’re all teachers. There is one god – they all serve him! Like in Hinduism: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva – they are one god, who creates in three different ways.

I think we are on this planet for too short a time to waste it. And so, I live every day. From beginning to end, I experience it. I try to do everything I possibly can, take every kind of drug I could, to…

WIth opiates you have the sense that you are wasting your life. Sleeping. Then you say to yourself: «I’m sleeping!» So you get up, and try to do other things, other drugs; I do all sort of drugs, but I remain active. That’s why I won’t quit until I find a steady girlfriend: otherwise I’ll die of boredom. But I don’t have a sense of security, stability, that I could have a lasting relationship, with a future. A junkie pays more attention to himself. All of us are little “Narcissi”, blooming here in this canal. Everything is always uncertain, you are always alone, so you say to yourself: «What’s the point?!» If you had a wife, kids, TV, a newspaper… It’s kind of idyllic. That’s why there are movies to experience another life. More or less, that’s why there is art.

Her [ed. his mother’s] life was a failure, her marriage was a failure… And I’m a part of that failure. That’s probably how she sees it. And she wants to start over, but she doesn’t know how. You know what she does? She got an apartment, and she started decorating it in white and pink. Tsk! Why!? Total utopia.

What I mean is… She is starting with the things that should come last.

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares.

There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life – I repeat, everything – is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.

People can’t seem to get it through their heads that there is never any healing or closure. Ever. There is only a short pause before the next “horrifying” event. People forget there is such a thing as memory, and that when a wound “heals” it leaves a permanent scar that never goes away, but merely fades a little. What really ought to be said after one of these so-called tragedies is, “Let the scarring begin.”

Old people, they look back at the good old days, and it was good because they were young. But they act like it was “the day”. No, it was ’cause youth is good: that’s gone, you’re fucked; it’s not the day. And then they reject anything that’s new, it’s like we do with fucking hip-hop, if you’re in your 30s: «Oh, fuck that, that ain’t music, we had music back when 38 Special was around…» What? No. Let’s all fucking kill ourselves for the hypocrisy, right?

The worst thing that can happen to a man who spends a lot of time alone, is to lack imagination. Life, already dull and repetitive in itself, becomes, without fantasy, a morbid spectacle.

Pirandello proposed, among the alternative solutions to the problems of existence, murder, suicide, or madness; nowadays, in an age of frantic synergies, we must combine the different possibilities, so we must become completely mad, kill the highest possible number of individuals, and then finally commit suicide.

So depressing was the subject of the human condition that humans learnt to avoid even acknowledging its existence, despite the fact that it was the real issue before us as a species. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point in his now-famous line, “About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ch.7, 1921).

Time destroys all things.

Madness is simply pain.

Despair is madness. Madness, the perception of the impossibility of living: being there, but as if not being there. Despair as an experience of madness is incompatible with life. It sees death, plans death, and kills the self and the other. Despair is a form of madness possible for man, for all men; it is, in fact, a human perspective, tied to his need to be with others, to the fact that he cannot live alone, because human life is not solitude but sharing, belonging, attachment.

– Oh, was I mean? You can’t take it? The happening chick that you are?

– Lizzie, I’m not crying because you’re mean. I just can’t imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you.

– You’re a… you’re a bit of a thinker, aren’t you?

– I don’t know.

– Well, you are.

The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

[…] every living creature on Earth dies alone.

“What surprises you most about mankind?”

God answered:

“That they get bored of being children, are in a rush to grow up, and then long to be children again. That they lose their health to make money and then lose their money to restore their health. That by thinking anxiously about the future, they forget the present, such that they live neither for the present nor the future. That they live as if they will never die, and they die as if they had never lived.”

We pass the time of day to forget how time passes.

We live with our dreams, but in the end, only the truth remains. And unfortunately we understand it only when we are gone.

Some people are alive simply because it’s against the law to kill them.

Variations:

Many people are alive only because it’s illegal to shoot them.

The law against murder is the number one thing preventing murder.

[…]

You stand before the final dimension, and I am the darkness of eternity…

[…]

All life bears death from birth. Life fears death, but lives only to die. It starts with anxiety. Anxiety becomes fear. Fear leads to anger… anger leads to hate… hate leads to suffering… The only cure for this fear is total destruction. Kuja was a victim of his own fear. He concluded he could only save himself by destroying the origin of all things – the crystal.

[…]

…Now, the theory is undeniable. Kuja’s action proves it. All things live to perish. At last, life has uncovered this truth. Now, it is time to end this world.

[…]

I exist for one purpose… To return everything back to the zero world, where there is no life and no crystal to give life. In a world of nothing, fear does not exist. This is the world that all life desires.

[…]

Foolish creature… Your fears have already deluded you. One day, you will choose destruction over existence, as Kuja did. When he sought to destroy the crystal, the purpose of life ended. Now, come…

Dear life, when I said “can my day get any worse,” it was a rhetorical question, not a challenge.

There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals.

Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.

There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.

You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.

Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?

Morpheus: You’ve never used them before.

Susanna: But what if you don’t have a secret?

Lisa: Then you’re a lifer, like me.

I am Ultimecia. Time shall compress, all existence denied…

Reflect on your childhood: your sensation, your words, your emotions…

Time… It will not wait.

No matter how hard you hold on. It escapes you.

And… [And you’re going to die. / And everything will be destroyed.]

Right and wrong are not what separate us and our enemies. It’s our different standpoints, our perspectives that separate us. Both sides blame one another. There’s no good or bad side. Just two sides holding different views.

– You live in the uncertainty of freedom, we live in the eternal confinement. But what can be seen once the barriers of the ego are destroyed, isn’t the same for both sides?

The so-called ’psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ’hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling “Don’t!” and “Hang on!”, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

– I can read people’s minds. In my lifetime I have read the pasts, presents, and futures of thousands upon thousands of men and women.

[…]

And each mind that I peered into was stuffed with the same single object of obsession. That selfish and atavistic desire to pass on one’s seed… it was enough to make me sick. Every living thing on this planet exists to mindlessly pass on their DNA. We’re designed that way. And that’s why there is war.

But you… you are different… You’re the same as us. We have no past, no future. We live in the moment. That’s our only purpose.

Humans weren’t designed to bring each other happiness. From the moment we’re thrown into this world, we’re fated to bring each other nothing but pain and misery.

– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?

– What?

– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?

– You wouldn’t be you, if you couldn’t play.

– No, I want to know.

– Our bodies sway to music. «Oh, brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?»

– But don’t you wish, sometimes, that you couldn’t play, that you could just be ordinary?

– Like what? Live in the country? Making bread? Feeding chickens? Playing once a year with a bunch of amateurs?

– How dare you insult my sister like that…

– I wasn’t insulting her.

– Well, at least she chose her life. Not like you and me. We’re just trained freaks.

– But dad, you’re talking, like, in 25 years. Sorry, but I’d rather be happy now than in 25 years.

– Sure, you’re right. Perhaps it’s not much of a comfort at the moment. But anyway…

– ’Cause in 25 years… That’s, like, 25 years. It doesn’t exist.

Dear world… I have confusion around me in every direction from my brain. I’ve tried and tried to make it here in this fucking world… but I think it was a mistake that I was ever born. I do not feel guilty about taking my own life. I’ve tried your ways. I’ve had a job since I was thirteen years old. Making a living was never a real problem for me. The problem was all I see is misery and darkness. Die, die, die. I’ll put a gun to my fucking head right now.

Peoples got to work for a livin’. I believe in a blue-collar race. I think suicide’s the only way out[🡕] – out of life. I wanted to die. I tried to die, but I didn’t. They say it’s my depression, but what the fuck, man? I don’t fuckin’ know anymore. Which way should I fuckin’ turn, man?

I knew a guy who was dyslexic… but he was also cross-eyed… so everything came out right.

Cloud: I’ve… been thinking too. About the universe… planet… ocean. How wide and big… No matter where I go and what I do it won’t change a thing.

Cid: Maybe you’re right. But I came up with something different. I always thought this planet was so huge. But lookin’ at it from space, I realized it’s so small. We’re just floatin’ in the dark. Kind of makes you feel powerless. […] That’s why I say this planet’s still a kid. A little kid sick and trembling in the middle of this huge universe. […]

Vincent: City of the Ancients… The Ancients… after a long time that is probably what others will come to call us… Hmm…hwa ha ha ha… It’s only a matter of time for us.

A woman’s shoulders are the front lines of her mystique, and her neck, if she’s alive, has all the mystery of a border town. A no-man’s land in that battle between the mind and the body.

The sinking of the Titanic represented the end of an era, the broken dream of the belle époque. As with the fall of the Babylonian empire, the sinking of the Titanic represented the symbol of the crumbling of proud empires, with a similar mix of rich, bourgeois and poor all destined together for the abyss. It was the end of a legend that married technology to wealth, materialism to romance, illusion to fantasy.

[…]

But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing… the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way ‘up close and personal’ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small… [Tennis player] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way… Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.

Choose life; choose a job; choose a career; choose a family; choose a fucking big television; choose washing machines, cars, Compact Disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance; choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments; choose a starter home; choose your friends! Choose leisurewear and matching luggage; choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics; choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning; choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish fucked up brats that you’ve spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future; choose life.

But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life […]

---

[…] the job, the family, the fucking big television, the washing machine, the car, the Compact Disc and electric tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three-piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.

Shut me in, Levante. Shut me in.

The only unbearable thing, is that nothing is unbearable.

You know how I know it’s the end of the world? Because everything’s been done, every kind of music’s been tried, every government’s been tried, every fuckin’ hairstyle. How you gonna make it another thousand years, for Chrissake?

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Already from our dusk of birth, begins a destiny. Ruthless, for most human beings: if you are not born a billionaire, you are doomed forever. You have to give in to the everyday, procure stimuli for the project; instead of de-projecting, you are damned to the drawing.

As it began, it was over already, as in all Lorenzaccesque misadventures. If I had been the billionaire Schopenhauer, I certainly would not have written “The World as Will and Representation”. I would have been careful not to: one is not born to work, to explain oneself, to think; one is not even born to un-think, because even that is engaging with thought. One is not born to manage, to act-suffer: all this is inflicted upon us by circumstances.

Just as we passively endure every prenatal perception, we will also endure the signifier. In the recurrence of life, discourse will never belong to the speaking being.

The registry office, the studying to survive, condemn us to in-forming ourselves, to form ourselves, deform ourselves, to become hunchbacked like Leopardi, just to have a part, when we would want nothing more than to put aside art, and life itself too. A true curse.

Any so-called “know-it-all” expertise is bullshit, and any problem is a false problem. For once, on this show, we’re really talking about bullshit, finally! It’s about time!, to recognize that we’re always talking bullshit. Tonight we’re saying it’s not just tonight that it’s bullshit, but that we’re always just talking words – that is, bullshit.

And time will destroy all those as well. Why do people insist on creating things that will inevitably be destroyed? Why do people cling to life, knowing that they must someday die? …Knowing that none of it will have meant anything once they do?

[…]

Bleh! You people make me sick! You sound like lines from a self-help book! If that’s how it’s going to be… I’ll snuff them all out! Every last one of your sickening, little happy reasons for living!

Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as ’the law of the market’. In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. On the economic plane Raphael Tisserand belongs in the victors’ camp; on the sexual plane in that of the vanquished. Certain people win on both levels; others lose on both. Businesses fight over certain young professionals; women fight over certain young men; men fight over certain young women; the trouble and strife are considerable.

Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance. Their existence is I admit an exception to the laws of nature, not only because this fracture of basic maladjustment is produced outside of any genetic finality but also by dint of the excessive lucidity it presupposes, an obviously transcendent lucidity in relation to the perceptual schemas of ordinary existence. It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, providing he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolutely inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.

– Have you ever seen a dead body?

– Only me own.

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Mitch: You ever been in love?

Curly: Once. I was driving a herd across the panhandle. Texas. I don’t know… Passed near this little dirt farm right about sundown. Out in the field was this young woman, working down in the dirt. Just about then, she stood up to stretch her back. Ah… Ah… She was wearing a little cotton dress, and the settin’ sun was right behind her, showing the shape that God gave her.

Mitch: What happened?

Curly: Ah! I just turned around and rode away.

Mitch: Why?

Curly: I figured it wasn’t gonna get any better than that.

Mitch: Yeah, but you could have been, you know… with her.

Curly: I’ve been with lots of women…

Mitch: Yeah, but you know, she could have been the love of your life.

Curly: She is.

[…]

Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?

Mitch: No, what?

Curly: *points index finger skyward* This.

Mitch: Your finger?

Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean shit.

Mitch: That’s great, but… what’s the “one thing?”

Curly: *smiles and points his finger at Mitch* That’s what you gotta figure out.

A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.

Hope is the last thing to die… but it’s always the first to fuck you over.

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

If you don’t remove the world as will and representation, this mania… The principle of individuation by which we wake up in the morning, we want to kill ourselves, then two or three coffees are enough, and off we go, back to deceive, to kill time.

For me, the fuller the [theatre] halls are, the emptier they are.

Madness is the emergency exit… you can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away… forever.

I’m not interested in solving the ills of society. I don’t want to save the world. I don’t even want to save me… I think most talk is so boring; I mean: save this, do that, do this… I think we’re all so boring saying everything we don’t even wanna save ourselves, we’re so boring talking about it. There’s nothing left to save, we’re so fucking boring. Let it die, I say. Let there be a new beginning. It’s awful. Goodnight.

Tully: You know, in the guest house, you could write in peace.

Henry: Hey, Tully baby… Nobody who could write worth a damn could ever write in peace, Jesus…

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

Henry: Hey, you don’t believe in that crap, do you?

Wanda: Sure. The more crap you believe in, the more better off you are.

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found. «This is it… this is where I belong…»

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.

From the sketch to the work one travels on one’s knees.

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion.

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

After you finish the first 90% of a project, you have to finish the other 90%.

[…] for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork and provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called “schools,” […]

Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.

– What is the Nothing?

– It’s the emptiness that’s left. It’s like a despair, destroying this world, and I have been trying to help it.

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

– Sorry, Venkman. I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.

It’s no longer a question of staying healthy. It’s a question of finding a sickness you like.

Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves.

Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.
Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person – of any person whatsoever – instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.

The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.

Everything wearies me, including what doesn’t weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain.

[…]

There are times when dreaming eludes even me, an obsessive dreamer, and then I see things in vivid detail. The mist in which I take refuge dissipates. And every visible edge cuts the skin of my soul. Every harsh thing I see wounds the part of me that recognizes its harshness. Every object’s visible weight weighs heavy inside my soul.

It’s as if my life amounted to being thrashed by it.

I’m forever on the defensive. I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which I’m reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if they were showing affection to a child, someone with no notion of life’s certainty and exactness.

This used to irritate me, because I naïvely assumed that this outward smile directed at dreaming and self-expression sprang from an inner conviction of superiority. In fact it’s only a reaction to something that’s different. While I once took this smile as an insult, because it seemed to imply a superior attitude, today I see it as the sign of an unconscious doubt. Just as adults often recognize in us, who are devoted to dreaming and expressing, something different that makes them suspicious, just because it’s unfamiliar. I like to think that the smartest among them sometimes detect our superiority, and then smile in a superior way to hide the fact.

But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.

Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us.

There’s no bad like a good man gone bad.

The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

God: he can’t find us any better than Santa Claus.

In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

Life is a state of mind.

Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.

[…]

The horror… The horror…