Foul Trouble Book Quotes

ROTHKO: (Explodes) 'Pretty.' 'Beautiful.' 'Nice.' 'Fine.' That's our life now! Everything's 'fine'. We put on the funny nose and glasses and slip on the banana peel and the TV makes everything happy and everyone's laughing all the time, it's all so goddamn funny, it's our constitutional right to be amused all the time, isn't it? We're a smirking nation, living under the tyranny of 'fine.' How are you? Fine.. How was your day? Fine. How are you feeling? Fine. How did you like the painting? Fine. What some dinner? Fine... Well, let me tell you, everything is not fine!! HOW ARE YOU?!... HOW WAS YOUR DAY?!... HOW ARE YOU FEELING? Conflicted. Nuanced. Troubled. Diseased. Doomed. I am not fine. We are not fine. We are anything but fine... Look at these pictures. Look at them! You see the dark rectangle, like a doorway, an aperture, yes but it’s also a gaping mouth letting out a silent howl of something feral and foul and primal and REAL. Not nice. Not fine. Real. A moan of rapture. Something divine or damned. Something immortal, not comic books or soup cans, something beyond me and beyond now. And whatever it is, it’s not pretty and it’s not fine...I AM HERE TO STOP YOUR HEART‬

A person of good character is he who is modest, says little, causes little trouble, speaks the truth, seeks the good, worships much, has few faults, meddles little, desires the good for all, and does good works for all. He is compassionate, dignified, measured, patient, content, grateful, sympathetic, friendly, abstinent, and not greedy. He does not use foul language, nor does he exhibit haste, nor does he harbor hatred in his heart. He is not envious. He is candid, well-spoken, and his friendship and enmity, his anger and his pleasure are for the sake of God Most High and nothing more.

So attached to [their lost city of Pajarocu] were and are they that they have refused to duplicate it here on any lesser scale, although duplicating it on its original scale is still far beyond their reach. What they have done instead is to duplicate its plan to perfection—without duplicating, or attempting to duplicate, its substance at all. There are “streets” paved with grass and fern between “buildings” and “manteions” that are no more than clearings in the forest marked in ways that are, to our eyes, almost undetectable. When the adult citizens we sought to question were willing to talk to us, they talked of gateways, walls and statues that did not in fact exist— or at least, that did not exist here on Blue—and described them in as much detail as if they loomed before us, together with colossal images of Hierax, Tartaros, and the rest, called by outlandish sobriquets and the objects of strange, cruel veneration. But when the streets are too badly fouled or the river rises, this phantom Pajarocu goes elsewhere, which I think an excellent idea. Our own Viron was built on the southern shore of Lake Limna; when the lake retreated, our people clung to the shiprock buildings that Pas had provided when they ought to have clung to the idea that he had provided instead, the idea of a city by the lake. Many (although certainly not all) of Viron’s troubles may ultimately have been due to this single mistaken choice. Listen to me, Horn and Hide. Listen all you phantom readers. Buildings are temporary, ideas permanent.