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“Where did all the good stones go, and all simplicity?”

Steinbeck, East of Eden

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“Well maybe Elmo thinks there is no right cookie, you just pick one and take a bite!”

Alison Brie, Five Year Engagement

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“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

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from the personal library of David Lynch

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- Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

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“I have the distinct pleasure

Of slowly untethering

The one side

From the other

Which is like unbuckling

A stack of vertebrae

With delicacy

For I must only use

The tips

Of my fingers

With which I will

One day close

My mother’s eyes

This is as delicate

As we can be

In this life”

-from “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt”, Ross Gay

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how to triumph like a girl by Ada Limón

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Sometimes I’ll be driving or doing laundry and I’ll have a full body realization that I’ve become a new person again. Every time it happens it’s a little more bittersweet. Sometimes, when I don’t like myself, I find comfort in knowing that one day soon I will look up at the road and be hit with that startling feeling of having changed again.

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“Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and man is consequently abandoned, for he cannot find anything to rely on - neither within nor without.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism”

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“There is nothing to show that I am Abraham, and yet I am constantly compelled to perform exemplary deeds.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism”

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“For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”

Albert Camus, “The Stranger”

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“And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”

Albert Camus, “The Stranger”

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“Try as I might, I couldn’t stomach this brutal certitude. For really, when one came to think of it, there was a disproportion between the judgment on which it was based and the unalterable sequence of events starting from the moment when that judgment was delivered. The fact that the verdict was read out at eight p.m. rather than at five, the fact that it might have been quite different, that it was given by men who change their underclothes, and was credited to so vague an entity as the “French people”—for that matter, why not to the Chinese or the German people?—all these facts seemed to deprive the court’s decision of much of its gravity. Yet I could but recognize that, from the moment the verdict was given, its effects became as cogent, as tangible, as, for example, this wall against which I was lying, pressing my back to it.”

Albert Camus, “The Stranger”

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“I hadn’t grasped how days could be at once long and short. Long, no doubt, as periods to live through, but so distended that they ended up by overlapping on each other.”

Albert Camus, “The Stranger”

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“That was unthinkable, he said; all men believe in God, even those who reject Him. Of this he was absolutely sure; if ever he came to doubt it, his life would lose all meaning. “Do you wish,” he asked indignantly, “my life to have no meaning?” Really I couldn’t see how my wishes came into it, and I told him as much.”

Albert Camus, “The Stranger”

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“We could only watch each other, never lowering our eyes; the whole world seemed to have come to a standstill on this little strip of sand between the sunlight and the sea, the twofold silence of the reed and stream. And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire— and it would come to absolutely the same thing.”

Albert Camus, “The Stranger”

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“That was ‘why, during the last year, I seldom went to see her. Also, it would have meant losing my Sunday-not to mention the trouble of going to the bus, getting my ticket, and spending two hours on the journey each way.”

Albert Camus, “The Stranger”