“What I claim is to live to the full the contradictions of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.”

–Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“You just don’t know,” she said. “You hide in this little fortress, behind wire and sandbags, and you don’t know what it’s all about. Sometimes I want to eat this place. Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country-the dirt, the death-I just want to eat it and have it there inside me. That’s how I feel. It’s like…this appetite. I get scared sometimes-lots of times-but it’s not bad. You know? I feel close to myself. When I’m out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it’s like I’m full of electricity and I’m glowing in the dark-I’m on fire almost-I’m burning away into nothing-but it doesn’t matter because I know exactly who I am. You can’t feel like that anywhere else.”

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

“The night, which had terrified us at first, seemed almost pleasant by comparison. In the end we longed for the night and waited for it. It was harder for them to shoot at us then than in the daytime. That was the only difference that counted. It’s hard to face the facts, even in connection with war the imagination holds its own for a long time. Cats who’ve been threatened by fire for too long end up jumping in the water.”

Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“…I invoke the friendly, lively muse of cities to help me sing the song of the faithful dog, the mangy dog, the pitiful dog, the dog everybody kicks around because he is dirty and covered with fleas, except the poor man whose companion he is, and the poet who looks upon him with a brotherly eye.”

Charles Baudelaire, “The Faithful Dog” in Paris Spleen

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 

madness, starving hysterical naked, 

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 

looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-

ery of night…”

-Allen Ginsberg, Howl

“Even more beautiful than a beautiful thing is the ruin of a beautiful thing.”

–August Rodin

“I don’t paint what is. I paint what seems.”

–Claude Monet

“And going home at that hour of the day when Wisdom’s counsels are not silenced by the roar of the outside world, he said to himself: ‘I have possessed three homes today, and was equally happy in all of them. Why should I drive my body from place to place, when my soul travels so lightly? And why carry out one’s projects, since the project is sufficient pleasure in itself?’”

–Charles Baudelaire, “Projects” in Paris Spleen

“The body expresses an idea of the shape of the person inside.”

–Moroni Poet