Just Quotage Now.
Book: Lancelot by Walker Percy
Reminds me of: Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, the movie "Closer," other things I can't place.
*What did I want to see?...What new sweet-horrid revelation did I expect to gain from witnessing what I already knew? Was it a kind of voyeurism? Or was it a desire to feel the lance strike home to the heart of the abscess and let the pus out? I still don't know. I knew only that it was necessary to know, to know only as the eyes know. The eyes have to know.
*And I? I was sitting gazing down at her, my thumbnail against my teeth, thinking of the queerness of the present here-and-now moment. Other times belong to someone or something or oneself and smell of someone or something or oneself. The present is something else. To live in the past and future is easy. To live in the present is like threading a needle.
*When the truth is, nobody understands anyone else, and nobody is reconciled because nobody knows what there is to be reconciled. Or if there is something to be reconciled, the way it is done in the movies, by handshakes, level-eyed looks, expressions of mute understanding, doesn't work.
*Here is an incidental discovery: If you tell somebody what to do, they will do it. All you have to do is know what to do. Because nobody else knows.
*What was nutty was that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world but the real world thought that its reality could only be found in the illusions. Two sets of maniacs.
*...we know in the South the real purpose of manners is to make life easier for everyone, easier both to keep to oneself and to avoid the uneasy commerce of offense and even insult. Either one shakes hands with someone or one ignores him or one kills him. What else is there?
*Could it be possible that since the greatest good is to be found in love, so is the greatest evil.
*There is something worse than knowing the worst. It is not knowing.
*Did I love her?...I loved her sexually in such a way that I could not not touch her. My happiness was being with her...I hugged and kissed her in the street, necked in the car like white trash...There is no joy on this earth like falling in love with a woman and managing at the same time the trick of keeping just enough perspective to see her fall in love too, to see her begin to see you in a different way, to see her color change, eyes soften, her hand of itself reach for you...And there is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you. Do you know what jealousy is? Jealousy is an alteration in the very shape of time itself. Time loses its structure. Time stretches out. She isn't here. Where is she? Who is she with? There is so much time. The minutes and hours creep by. What is she doing? She could be doing anything. She was not here. Her not being here was like oxygen not being here. What am I going to do with the rest of the day? Something tightened in my chest.
*The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older, you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. THe present is the tape head, the mouth of time.
*Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life...(How happy scientists are! Why didn't we become scientists? They confront problems which can be solved. We don't know what we confront. Does it have a name?)
*There was no other thought than to possess her, as much of her with as much of me and any way at all, all ways and it seemed for always. Drinking, laughing, and loving, it is a good life. Not even marriage spoils it. For a while.
(also, there are like a million great quotes in his other book which I read first, The Moviegoer, and which kind of had no plot and was less good, but parts of it were incredibly worded and so true, but my fingers are all typed out for tonight and I still have more clothes to sort through. Like why do I have clothes from when I was in 8th grade? SRSLY?)