β
These are hard times. The world hurts. We live in fear and forget to walk with hope. But hope has not forgotten you. So ask it to dinner. It's probably hungry and would appreciate the invitation.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
In a world like this one, only the random makes sense.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
She never utters a sound even when she's crying, and that makes me a little sad. Doesn't seem right. When you cry, people should hear you. The world should stop.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
You can never know about about your own destiny: are the people you meet there to play a part on your oun destiny, or do you exist just to play a role in theirs?
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
I'm healthy as an ox. And you?" "To compare myself with a bovine would be both ridiculous and insulting, but I'm fit as ever, if that is what you are asking.
β
β
Christopher Paolini (Brisingr (The Inheritance Cycle, #3))
β
I don't think you should die until you're ready. Until you've wrung out every last bit of living you can.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
So, now I've been to see a drug counselor who told me I need to lay off the drugs and talk about my feelings, and a shrink who heard what I had to say and immediately put me on drugs.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
People always think they know other people, but they donβt. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they wonβt eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they donβt know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel fucked up and sad for no reason at all.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
The dark does not weep for itself because there is no light. Rather, it accepts that it is the dark.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
I'm just saying it's not all sand castles and ninjas.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Dude, this is a stoner conversation and we're not even high
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Think: who has vans, huh? Soccer moms and serial killers.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Maybe that's what real friendship is -- getting so used to people that you need to be annoyed by them.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
You've influenced the world not because you wanted to hug it and cuddle it and call it sweet thing, but because one day you wanted to beat the crap out of somebody but you didn't. You made a painting instead.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Youβve been assigned an identity since birth. Then you spend the rest of your life walking around in it to see if it really fits. You try on all these different selves and abandon just as many. But really itβs about dismantling all that false armor, getting down to whatβs real.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
I can be whatever.
You can be whatever.
We can be whatever.
Whatever, together.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Dammit!"
"What?" Gonzo sounds panicked.
"We're out of gas."
"You're Shithenging me."
"I Shithenge you not.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World. I'm sixteen now, so you can imagine that's left me with quite a few days of major suckage.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
- 'Music opens your soul, makes you ready.'
- 'Ready for what?'
- He smiles big. 'Exactly.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
But as soon as the thought enters my mind, another one swims in and eats the first one like a shark. Fuck that, it burps.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Board the cows! We've come to enslave your marigolds.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
The cow is of the bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other milk.
β
β
Ogden Nash (Free Wheeling)
β
In our travels, we have come across many equations--math for understanding the universe, for making music, for mapping stars, and also for tipping, which is important. Here is our favorite equation: Us plus Them equals All of Us. It is very simple math. Try it sometime. You probably wonβt even need a pencil.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Pursuing happiness, and I did, and still do, is not at all the same as being happy- which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.
If the sun is shining, stand in it- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass- they have to- because time passes.
The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is lifelong, and it is not goal-centred.
What you are pursuing is meaning- a meaningful life. There's the hap- the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use- that's going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.
β
β
Jeanette Winterson (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?)
β
Everything is randomly connected.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
How do people stay in love, anyway? Is it a choice? Or is it like those plants we studied in biology that mutate into something new and totally different but are still part of the same plant family?
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Jeez, someone needs to push the reset button on this planet.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
And when it comes, her kiss is like something not so much felt as found.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Look, I know this seems a little half-assed...' 'No, dude. I'd be thrilled if this plan were half-assed. This is, like, no-assed.' 'You're right. It's the most no-assed thing I've ever done in my life.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
There's no such thing as nothing. In every nothing, there's a something. In fact, there could be everything!
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
To live is to love, to love is to live.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
The dark does not weep for itself because there is no light. Rather, it accepts that it is the dark. It is said that even the gods must die." He winks. "But not without one hell of a fight.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
For studying courage in textbooks doesnβt make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professorβand the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking
β
β
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life)
β
And the ice is melting in the bowl, and at the next table you see someone's bloodshot, bovine eyes, and you're afraid, afraid . . . Oh, gods, my gods, poison, bring me poison!
β
β
Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita)
β
Who the heck is Don Quick-oats?
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
...a woman of quite bovine stupidity and potato-like contours...
β
β
Frederick Forsyth (The Deceiver)
β
Oh shit! Can you say 'fuck' in a graveyard or will it jinx you with the undead?
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Nobody Wants to be themselves. That's why there's tv. -Ephigenia,
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Wow, you're awesome and The universe loves a winner, so the universe must really love you!
β
β
Libba Bray
β
Everyone's dying. A little, every day. Make it count.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
If this were a movie, I would bust a secret move so fierce the entire place would be razed to the ground. I'd finish with something snappy like "And don't forget my soda, punk" while I strolled off into the night.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Without further warning, the sky opens up and cries.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
I've never done acid, finding it hard to go willingly to a place that could be frightening, hellish, and totally beyond my control. A place much like high school.
β
β
Libba Bray
β
We have traveled through space and time. We have been many places. Visited many worlds. And there is good news: the acoustics everywhere are terrific.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Mom's crying a bit, quietly, the way she always does. She never utters a sound even when she's crying, and that makes me a little sad. Doesn't seem right. When you cry, people should hear you. The world should stop. I squeeze Mom's hand and she squeezes back. I don't say anything, but at least she knows I've heard her. (Going Bovine)
β
β
Libba Bray
β
all abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another. i could not have done what i have done as a writer had i been a gifted mathematician or physicist.
honesty wrung out of him by pain, he cried out with a loud voice.
β
β
William S. Burroughs (My Education: A Book of Dreams)
β
Ain't that a sight? With all the things we know and learn, we still ain't touched the big mysteries -- where we come from, where we go next, why we even her. And when something truly miraculous happens, we run and hide in our caves. We deny.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
We've left the moment. It's gone. We're somewhere else now, and that's okay. We've still got that moment with us somewhere, deep in our memory, seeping into our DNA. And when our cells get scattered , whenever that happens, this moment will still exist in them. Those cells might be the building block of something new. A planet or star or a sunflower, a baby. Maybe even a cockroach. Who knows? Whatever it is, it'll be a part of us, this thing right here and now, and we'll be a part of it.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Youβve never seen surprise until youβve looked into the eyes of an ascending bovine.
β
β
Maria Dahvana Headley (Magonia (Magonia, #1))
β
You don't know me, dude," he says, not smiling this time. Gonzo examines his cards, prepping for his next move. "People always think that they know other people, but they don't. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won't eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don't know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel ****ed up for no reason at all.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Free the snow globes!
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
I've been poked and prodded in places I'd always prided myself on keeping untouched for that one special doctor who gives me a ring and a promise someday.
β
β
Libba Bray
β
You're special.
I'm special.
The whole world's special, so don't you forget it.
The universe wants us
All to be happy,
Full of smiles and all that stuff,
All that stuff
That's happy and smiley.
So get happy, happy, happy right now!
Get happy, happy, happy right now!
Get happy, happy, happy right now!
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Oh, hello," Dr. M says, shaking Balder's hand. "Wonderful costume. I'm a bit of a role player myself on the weekends. Tell me, where did you get the helmet?"
It was forged in the North, blessed by the hands of Odin, given to me by my mother, Frigg," Balder answers.
Lovely. I got mine on the Internet.
β
β
Libba Bray
β
We all walk in a land of dreams. For what are we but atoms and hope, a handful of stardust and sinew? We are weary travelers trying to find our way home on a road that never ends. Am I a part of your dream? or are you but a part of mine?
β
β
Libba Bray
β
I feel like I swallowed a Magritte. Like on the inside, I'm made of clouds and floating eyes, green apples, and slowly rising men in bowler hats.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
It seemed odd no one had thought of it before but in general there is no accounting for the bovine stupidity of mankind.
β
β
Zachary Mason (The Lost Books of the Odyssey)
β
They misspelled 'party.' How evil genius can they be?
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
And at midnight there came an apparition in hell. A handsome dark-eyed man with a dagger-like beard, in a tailcoat, stepped onto the veranda and cast a regal glance over his domain. They used to say, the mystics used to say, that there was a time when the handsome man wore not a tailcoat but a wide leather belt with pistol butts sticking out from it, and his raven hair was tied with scarlet silk, and under his command a brig sailed the Caribbean under a black death flag with a skull and crossbones.
But no, no! The seductive mystics are lying, there are no Caribbean Seas in the world, no desperate freebooters to sail them, no corvette chases after them, no cannon smoke drifts across the waves. There is nothing, and there was nothing! There is that sickly linden over there, there is the cast-iron fence, and the boulevard beyond itβ¦And the ice is melting in the bowl, and at the next table you see someoneβs bloodshot, bovine eyes, and youβre afraid, afraidβ¦Oh, gods, my gods, poison, bring me poison!...
β
β
Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita)
β
Doll bends over, checking a barrel; she got hips on her under that skirt, sturdy, bovine, though sheβd kill him if he said as much. His cheek yearns for her lap, for her stroking hands, for her fantastically common reek of beer and ham and Parma Violets.
β
β
Lesley Glaister (Blasted Things)
β
The Lesson You've Got
to learn is the someday you'll someday
stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears
shed, ready to poke your bovine head
in the yoke they've shaped.
Everyone learns this. Born, everyone
breathes, pays tax, plants dead
and hurts galore. There's grief enough
for each. My mother
learned by moving man to man,
outlived them all. The parched earth's
bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched
the instants I trod it.
Other than myself, of course.
I've made a study of bearing
and forbearance. Everyone does,
it turns out, and note
those faces passing by: Not one's a god.
β
β
Mary Karr (Sinners Welcome)
β
How now Mad Cow?
β
β
Libba Bray
β
You evah hear of a magic screw?'
I cough back a laugh. 'No. No, sir.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
He's got a laugh like a machine gun firing through velvet.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
For me, boviscopophobia (=the morbid fear of being seen as bovine) is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
β
β
David Foster Wallace
β
To me, tea taste like dried lawn-clippings, diluted leaf mould, watered-down compost mixed with a dash of bovine bodily fluid.
β
β
Maggie O'Farrell (I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death)
β
Gonzo narrows his eyes. 'How often do you clean that thing?' 'Every night,' the waitress answers. Her smile is strained. 'That's it? Do you know how long it takes for Listeria to grow under those hot lamps, even with ice?' Here we go. 'It can happen in just five hours. Five hours and you've got the salad bar of death!' The waitress looks confused. 'From Listerine?
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
...we're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works-- groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless-- have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
They tended to be stolid, slovenly, heavy, and to my eyes effeminate - not in the sense of delicacy, etc., but in just the opposite sense: a gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge.
β
β
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness)
β
She holds up a finger. "I'm getting to it. Don't rush a girl in the middle of her exposition.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
A guy's gotta live, you know, gotta make his way and find his meaning in life and love, and to do that he needs coffee, he needs coffee and coffee and coffee.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
I thought I was having an existential crisis, but it was nothing.
Please don't tailgate: body in trunk.
β
β
Libba Bray
β
I miss Latin. So much fun--all those exciting verbs that don't come until the end of the sentence. It's like a movie trailer for language.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Maybe thereβs a heaven, like they say, a place where everything weβve ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find out human hijinks amusing. Or maybe weβre an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but weβre still hard-wired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe weβre all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying againβeach of us playing our parts in the otherβs plotlines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it.
β
β
Libba Bray
β
Greetings, ax murderer! I was just wondering how you like your eggs?
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
As a kid, I imagined lots of different scenarios for my life. I would be an astronaut. Maybe a cartoonist. A famous explorer or rock star. Never once did I see myself standing under the window of a house belonging to some druggie named Carbine, waiting for his yard gnome to steal his stash so I could get a cab back to a cheap motel where my friend, a neurotic, death-obsessed dwarf, was waiting for me so we could get on the road to an undefined place and a mysterious Dr. X, who would cure me of mad cow disease and stop a band of dark energy from destroying the universe.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
In the end, I take my shoes off and stick my feet in, letting the lukewarm water lick at my ankles. It feels good, and not just because Iβm stoned. I make a mental note to add this to Dulcieβs list of things worth living for. For some reason, I keep seeing her rolling her eyes at me, that big, goofy grin stretching her face like Silly Putty. On my private list, I add her smile. She doesnβt have to know.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
A token of bathroom stoner etiquette.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
For a second, I stop fighting and think about what he's asking me. Did I live? I made a best friend. Lost another. Cried. Laughed. Lost my virginity. Gained a piece of magic, gave it away. Possibly changed a man's destiny. Drank beer. Slept in cheap motels. Got pissed off. Laughed some more. Escaped from the police and bounty hunters. Watched the sun set over the ocean. Had a soda with my sister. Saw my mom and dad as they are. Understood music. Had sex again, and it was pretty mind-blowing. Not that I'm keeping score. Okay, I'm keeping score. Played the bass. Went to a concert. Wandered around New Orleans. Freed the snow globes. Saved the universe.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
You ignorant whelp. You dare to warn me away from her? I created her. Without my influence, Charlotte would be a bovine in the country with a half-dozen children at her skirts...or spreading her legs for every man who dropped a coin between her breasts. I've spent a fortune to make her into something far better than she was ever meant to be."
"Why don't you send me a bill?"
"It would beggar you," Radnor assured him with raw contempt.
"Send it anyway," Nick invited gently. "I'll be interested to learn the cost of creating someone.
β
β
Lisa Kleypas (Worth Any Price (Bow Street Runners, #3))
β
That's totally their interpreter," a girl with a lip ring informs us. "Even though they totally record their music in English, they totally speak in Inuktitut. Totally.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
The world's most bada** Viking yard gnome is on the counter by the cash register using a dinner plates as a shield and a steak knife as a sword
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
The glow dies down, and she's standing at the end of my bed--the one who's been following me around leaving feather messages. I take in the torn fishnets, plaid mini-kilt, shiny, riveted breastplate with leather straps at the sides and a worn Great Temolo decal near the left shoulder. Her wings are a crazy black-and-white-checkered pattern, like they've been spray-painted at a body shop to look like hipster sneakers.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
She dances a little jig. "This would make one hell of a TV show, huh?"
"Yeah. But no one would believe it." I should let it go. But it's like the hole, like the door, and I have to know. Or at least, I have to ask. "Hey, Dulcie, was any of that real?"
ο»ΏShe finishes her dance and the wings come to rest. "Who's to say what's real or not?"
"Yeah, but--my barometer on reality, not so good since I started going crazy.
"Yeah, well, who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
I feel like I swallowed a Magritte. Like on the inside, I'm made of clouds and floating eyes, green apples, and slowly rising men in bowler hats."
"You are officially the most annoying unreal creature ever."
"Meet a lot of us, do you?
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
The ground's soft with pine needles and the occasional crunch of a cone. The air smells like it's just been born.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Why must we die when everything within us was born to live?
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
She has a scent that is familiar and comforting, like all the things you wish you could take with you on your travels to make you feel less alone.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Eu considerei a sua cara e sabia a felicidad," Balder murmurs from the backseat, his eyes still closed. "I looked upon your face and knew happiness."
Without further warning, the sky opens up and cries.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
Just when I think you canβt get any creeper, you astounded me by reaching a whole new plateau. What did you do to yourself? Youβre twitching like a meth head.β βWent into the kitchen. Consumed any products that claimed to boost energy. Ate a bowl of those disgusting brown rinds.β βRinds? Thatβs coffee, dumbass. Youβre supposed to brew it.β Rip rambled on as if she hadnβt spoken, whichβjudging by his herky-jerky gesturesβhe might not have been aware she had. βThen I drank your last three of those products involving some sort of red bovine, followed by half a dozen vials that claim to bestow energy for an allotted period of time. Every part of me tingles. Quite honestly, I think I could fly if the moment required it.
β
β
Stacey Rourke (Crane (The Legends Saga, #1))
β
Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the saem as being happy - which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.
If the sun is shining, stand in it - yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass - they have to - because time passes.
The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred.
What you are pursuing is meaning - a meaningful life.
β
β
Jeanette Winterson (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?)
β
Defining words properly is a fine and peculiar craft. There are rulesβa word (to take a noun as an example) must first be defined according to the class of things to which it belongs (mammal, quadruped), and then differentiated from other members of that class (bovine, female). There must be no words in the definition that are more complicated or less likely to be known that the word being defined. The definition must say what something is, and not what it is not. If there is a range of meanings of any one wordβcow having a broad range of meanings, cower having essentially only oneβthen they must be stated. And all the words in the definition must be found elsewhere in the dictionaryβa reader must never happen upon a word in the dictionary that he or she cannot discover elsewhere in it. If the definer contrives to follow all these rules, stirs into the mix an ever-pressing need for concision and eleganceβand if he or she is true to the task, a proper definition will probably result.
β
β
Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary)
β
Nada disso vai melhorar a qualidade das torradeiras , mas Γ© um lance viajante que faz com que vocΓͺ passe o dia inteiro tentando desvendar a questΓ£o.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
CapΓtulo 13: onde sou hospitalizado, tenho um encontro com um anjo e outras coisas estranhas e irritantes.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
E achava que estava tendo uma crise existencial. Mas nΓ£o era nada.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
This? This is Putopia," says Dr. A, the tall guy with the curly hair who was trying to catch the grape in his mouth. He's wearing a T-shirt under his lab coat that reads MY BANG THEORY IS BIGGER THAN YOURS.
"Putopia?" I repeat.
"Yes. Putopia. It stands for Parallel Universe Travel Office... pia.
β
β
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
β
NO DIVINE BOVINE ! The clumsy creature currently inhabiting the White House is a distinctly dangerous animal. Part boneheaded raging bully, part dastardly coward showing signs of advanced stage mad cow disease. Neither of good pedigree nor useful breeding stock, there is essentially very little of substance between the T (bone) and the RUMP, except of course for an abundance of methane and bullshit. It's high time brave matadors for you to enter the bullring, with nimble step and fleet of foot. Take good aim and bring down this marauding beast once and for all. Slay public enemy number one and we will salute you forever. A louder cheer you will not hear from Madrid to Mexico City, from Beijing to Brussels, from London to Lahore, from Toronto to Tehran and ten thousand cities in between.
β
β
Alex Morritt (Impromptu Scribe)
β
There seemed no answer. He wasn't resigned to anything, he hadn't accepted or adjusted to the life he'd been forced into. Yet here he was, eight months after the plague's last victim, nine since he's spoken to another human being, ten since Virginia had died. Here he was with no future and a virtually hopeless present. Still plodding on.
Instinct? Or was he just stupid? Too unimaginative to destroy himself? Why hadn't he done it in the beginning when he was in the very depths? What had impelled him to enclose the house, install a freezer, a generator, an electric stove, a water tank, build a hothouse, a workbench, burn down the houses on each side of his, collect records and books and mountains of canned supplies, even - it was fantastic when you thought about it - even put a fancy mural on the wall?
Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments?
He closed his eyes. Why think, why reason? There was no answer. His continuance was an accident and an attendant bovinity. He was just too dumb to end it all, and that was about the size of it.
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Richard Matheson (I Am Legend)
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Out beyond and way back and further past that still. And such was it since. But after all appearances and some afternoons misspent it came to pass not all was done and over with. No, no. None shally shally on that here hill. Ah, but that was idle then and change was not an old hand. No, no. None shilly shilly on that here first rung. So, much girded and with new multitudes, a sun came purple and the hail turned in a year or two. And that was not all. No, no. None ganny ganny on that here moon loose. Turns were taken and time put in, so much heft and grimace, there, with callouses, all along the diagonal. Like no other time and the time taken back, that too like none other that can be compared to a bovine heap raising steam, or the eye-cast of a flailing comet. Back and forth, examining the egg spill and the cord fray and the clowning barnacle. And all day with no break to unwrap or unscrew or squint and flex or soak the brush. No, no. None flim flim on that here cavorting mainstay. From tree to tree and the pond there deepening and some small holes appearing and any number of cornstalks twisting into a thing far from corn. That being the case there was some wretched plotting, turned to stone, holding nothing. No, no. None rubby rubby on that here yardstick. Came then from the region of silt and aster, all along the horse trammel and fire velvet, first these sounds and then their makers. When passed betwixt and entered fully, pails were swung and notches considered. There was no light. No, none. None wzm wzm on that here piss crater. And it being the day, still considered. Oh, all things considered and not one mentioned, since all names had turned in and handed back. Knowing this the hounds disbanded and knowing that the ground muddled headstones and milestones and gallows and the almond-shaped buds of freshest honeysuckle. And among this chafing tumult fates were scrambled and mortality made untidy and pithy vows took themselves a breather. This being the way and irreversible homewards now was a lifted skeletal thing of the past, without due application or undue meaning. No, no. None shap shap on that here domicile shank. From right foot to left, first by the firs, then by the river, hung and loitered, and the blaze there slow to come. All night waking with no benefit of sleeping and the breath cranking and the heart-place levering and the kerosene pervading but failing to jerk a flame from out any one thing. No, none. None whoosh whoosh on that here burnished cunt. Oh, the earth, the earth and the women there, inside the simpering huts, stamped and spiritless, blowing on the coals. Not far away, but beyond the way of return.
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Claire-Louise Bennett (Pond)