“I was just sitting here, and you know what I said to myself? Even if I stop believing in life, if I lose my faith in that dear woman, if I lose faith in the order of things, if I even get the conviction that on the contrary everything is a disgraceful, cursed, and maybe a devilish chaos, even if you shock me with all the horrors of human disappointment — I still want to go on living, and once I’ve put my lips to this cup, I won’t tear myself away from it ‘til I have drunk it down! Though in actual fact by the time I am 30 I will probably fling down the cup without draining it and go away — I don’t know where. But by the time I’m 30, I know for sure, my youth will conquer everything — all disenchantment, all revulsion with life.”

•  13 March 2012

1: “You know what it means for a woman to be 24 years old?”

2: “It’s all over?”

1: “Almost. It means you have to stop making anthropological experiences with men.”

2: “I need two men; one to reason with and one to sleep with.”

•  24 February 2012

“A lot of men want a woman to mother them. They get with a woman and all they do is regress to the point where you might think he might not be capable to take care of himself at all. I don’t want another mother. I want a woman. I want to rise to the occasion. I want to learn and bask in your glow. I want to protect you and do whatever I can to give you strength. There is no twist to this. I am not about to blow my brains out. You have not cut me up like others have. It’s just this. I want to love you with everything in me. I need your help because I don’t know anything about it. I am suspicious and ready to leave and hit the cold road for the frozen dawn. I am just going to trust you with everything in me. I see now that it’s the only reason to be here. After kissing you, I cannot remember what it was like to kiss any other woman. At this point I am not sure if I ever have.”

— Henry Rollins

•  20 February 2012

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.”

— GGM, one hundred years of solitude

•  1 February 2012

“to be just a little less arrogant, to have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.”

This is the commencement address DFW gave to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. I would write a little caption about it but it would defeat the purpose. It is long but stick with it.

•  19 January 2012