#The surprise itself is like 90-95% done

[itsamenickname]

Stay tuned for a special little surprise I have planned for y'all this weekend. :)

[thewintersoldierdisaster]

fellow lawyer here but just graduated in may! any tips on not going absolutely insane during bar studying? we’re 3 weeks out and i feel like im going to puke constantly.

omg congrats!!! there’s nothing quite like your bar summer (i still have nightmares even though i’m a few years out lol)

i’m probably the worst person to ask for advice bc i drank 2-3 trenta black iced coffees a day and gave myself an ulcer, but i did pass on the first try so it was worth it

with just a couple of weeks left, my best advice is to trust yourself and trust your studying. you know more than you think you know!! but here’s a few more little bits of advice under the cut ☺️

stop studying about halfway through the day on the sunday before the test and just let your brain breathe, don’t study on monday either. the last few days before the test it’s going to feel like you know NOTHING, but i promise that’s not the case. random obscure little laws will pop into your brain while you’re taking the test and you’ll be surprised at what you recall. i have never felt stupider than when i went into the test on tuesday morning.

don’t let people around you stress you out with their method of studying. people will be rattling off statutes and ucc sections and you’ll feel like an idiot. or they’ll be taking time off from studying and making it look easy, but you can’t be concerned with what other people are doing (unless you surround yourself with friends who study in a similar manner, then embrace that and quiz each other with flash cards)

take little breaks during the day to walk around, outside or even a lap of the library. sitting still after a couple of hours drove me crazy

i put screen time limits on every app and allowed myself a few minutes to scroll socials at lunchtime and the end of the day just to wind down (i also watched a lot of yankee games when i was done studying for the night bc i didn’t need to use my brain and was distracted lol)

i did SO MANY practice essays and mpts, which i think is like the key to passing. towards the end of prep, i was just bullet pointing the issues, laws and analysis, not even writing a full essay because i wanted to make sure i could issue spot. and remember that even if you forget a law, you can make one up and apply your facts to your made up law and you’ll still get points!! better to write ANYTHING than NOTHING

it’s totally natural to feel like puking every day because it’s three months of psychological warfare, tbh. follow your bar prep schedule and don’t worry about falling behind a bit or skipping around. my professors told as that as long as you completed like 90-95% of the barbri schedule, we were in good shape

i cried every day of the last two weeks of bar prep, but not for longer than a few minutes. i just needed to get the emotion out

don’t eat anything too heavy or out of the norm the days leading up to the test. you don’t want to have gastro issues while sitting for the test! i didn’t drink that much while i was taking the test bc i didn’t want to have to run to the bathroom lol

you’ll feel totally numb afterwards and i couldn’t remember a single question by the time i got home, which is def the brain protecting itself from obsessing until results are out

it sucks so much, but the test goes faster than you think it will and you’re so much more prepared than you think you are, i promise!!!

GOOD LUCK and let me know how you feel after you take it!!! rooting for you so hard!!! 🤍🤍🤍

[whimsicallyenchantedrose]

Fluffy Fridays—Chapter 174: Capitaine Crochet--pt. 2

Fluffy Fridays—Chapter 174: Capitaine Crochet--pt. 2

Pairing:  Captain Swan

Summary:   A series of unrelated, fluffy one shots featuring Killian Jones and  Emma Swan and the relationship that makes us all swoon. Will contain  both canon and AU stories. My contribution to Operation Rainbow Kisses  and Unicorn Stickers (aka, my attempt to drown out the season 4 finale  angst with ridiculous levels of fluff.)

Other Chapters: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22) (23) (24) (25) (26) (27) (28) (29) (30) (31) (32) (33) (34) (35) (36) (37) (38) (39) (40) (41) (42) (43) (44) (45) (46) (47) (48) (49) (50) (51) (52) (53) (54) (55) (56) (57) (58) (59) (60) (61) (62) (63) (64) (65) (66) (67) (68) (69) (70) (71) (72) (73) (74) (75) (76) (77) (78) (79) (80) (81) (82) (83) (84) (85) (86) (87) (88) (89) (90) (91) (92) (93) (94) (95) (96) (97) (98) (99) (100) (101) (102) (103) (104) (105) (106) (107) (108) (109) (110) (111) (112) (113) (114) (115) (116) (117) (118) (119) (120) (121) (122) (123) (124) (125) (126) (127) (128) (129) (130) (131) (132) (133) (134) (135) (136) (137) (138) (139) (140) (141) (142) (143) (144) (145) (146) (147) (148) (149) (150) (151) (152) (153) (154) (155) (156)  (157) (158) (159) (160) (161) (162) (163) (164) (165) (166) (167) (168) (170) (171) (172) (173) (175)

(ao3) (ff.net)

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Emma’s first thought upon waking was that she didn’t feel sick to her stomach. Now that she’d entered into her second trimester, it looked like the morning sickness was finally abating.

Her second thought was that she was very much alone in her bed. Killian’s side was not only empty, but cold, proving he’d been up for a very long time. That in and of itself wasn’t so strange; he’d always been an early riser, but normally she could hear him puttering around downstairs or softly whistling sea shanties while he went about his morning. This morning–like far too many of late, the house was still and silent.

Had she snapped at him one too many times about his hovering? Had he finally gotten tired of her hormone and nausea induced surliness? She felt the guilt creep in when she thought of that moment she snapped at him a couple weeks ago and told him to get a hobby. He was just trying to help; she knew that, but old habits die hard. She’d spent so much of her time growing up  licking her wounds by herself that it was hard to let anyone–even the husband she loved with everything in her–take care of her.

Has it finally happened? That small, insecure voice deep within, asked, “Has he finally realized I’m not worth it? Has he gone off to find someone else who will let him care for them?

For a moment, the nausea almost returned, for a reason entirely unconnected to the little one inside, who was currently kicking for all she was worth, but Emma resolutely turned away from her insecurities. She knew Killian; had always known him. That man was as steady and faithful and dependable as any man she’d ever met. She’d be less surprised to hear that he’d doused the Jolly Roger in lighter fluid and set her on first than to hear he’d cheated on her–or even thought of doing so.

Her visits with Archie had really done wonders in helping her overcome her insecurities, even if they occasionally tried to creep back in.

No, it was more likely Killian was keeping his distance because it’s what he thought she wanted, what she needed.  It wasn’t. She needed him, even if early pregnancy discomfort brought out her worst side.

She shouldn’t have snapped at him the way she did. He deserved better.

And so she resolved to set things right–but first she had to find him.

His phone went straight to voicemail, not a surprise there. Killian was wary of technology at the best of times, and he seemed to have a particular aversion to what he called the “incessant chirping of that infernal talking phone”, and more often than not, he chose not to even turn it on in the first place. (They’d need to have a talk about that as she came closer to her due date and needed a reliable way to get ahold of him immediately, should she go into labor when he wasn’t with her.)

She first went to the Jolly Roger, and then to the docks where Smee worked, and then to the library, but all to no avail. Granny’s was the most logical next stop, but when she stepped inside and perused the diner, there was no sign of him.

She was on the point of turning to leave, when Leroy stopped her. “You lookin’ for Capitaine Crochet? Check the sitting room. Odds are he’s having one of his little sewing circles with his princess friends.”

“He’s…what?” Emma asked, fairly certain that there hadn’t been a single intelligible word in what the small man just said.

Rather than answer, Leroy merely hooked his thumb toward the inn portion of Granny’s establishment. Emma decided not to even try to get any more answers out of him. Instead she followed his directions.

She heard Killian before she saw him.

“The trick is to maintain an even tension,” he said. “It was a bit of a challenge to master, but since I have, my stitches are nice and even. See?”

What?

“Oh that is better!” Ashley said. “Thanks Killian!”

The sight that met Emma’s eyes once she entered the sitting room was something she’d never thought she’d see. Killian, the fearsome Captain Hook, sat in a frilly, pink armchair surrounded by Ashley, Kathryn, Mary Margaret, Belle and Ariel. All of them appeared to be…crocheting.

He looked up when she entered the room, his face coloring with apparent embarrassment, as he tried to hide the small piece of fabric he’d been constructing behind his back.

“Swan!” he yelped. “I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon. This was supposed to be a surprise”

“What? I…I was looking for you, Killian,” she said, making her way slowly to his side, and coaxing his hand back to the front so she could see what he was working on.

It looked like…it looked like her baby blanket.

“Is this where you’ve been disappearing every morning?”

He used his hook to scratch at that spot behind his ear and glanced aside. “Well, Love, you told me to get a hobby, and I’m trying to respect your wishes.”

Emma vaguely noticed the other women filing out of the room, giving them privacy for what looked to be a private conversation between spouses. She’d appreciate the gesture, if she could get past the shame she felt at pushing him away the way she had.

“I’m sorry, Killian,” she said, taking a seat next to him, and running soft fingers against the blanket he was making. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a bitch to you. I was kind of afraid I’d pushed you away or something, that you’d decided I wasn’t worth the effort.”

He looked up quickly, the shock evident in his eyes. “I assure you, my love, that will never be the case, no matter how out of sorts you might become. Nothing could ever convince me you aren’t worth the effort. To me, you are worth everything. You and our little cygnet.”

The tears came to her eyes then, and one spilled over and trailed down her cheek. “I know that Killian. I hope you know I feel the same.”

“Of course I do,” he said, leaning in to kiss her softly. “But this project is about more than staying out of your way when you bid me to do so.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking a bit uncertain. “I must admit to a bit of trepidation when it comes to our child–Oh I want her, more than anything, no fear of that–It’s just…”

“It’s just what, Killian?” she asked gently.

“What do I know about being a father?” he asked softly. “What do I know about caring for a child? What if I fail dismally? I thought, perhaps if I made her her own blanket, like the one you cherish, perhaps I could feel a bit less inadequate.”

Emma began to cry in earnest at that, as she pulled him in for a longer, more comforting kiss. When it came to an end, she stayed close, forehead against his, hand still at the nape of his neck. “Listen to me, Killian Jones. You are a wonderful father to Henry, and you’ll be an equally wonderful father to this little magic bean, no matter what you do or don’t give her. You love her, and that’s all that matters. You don’t ever have to try to prove yourself beyond that. But for the record, she’s going to love the blanket her daddy made her.”

“You really think so?” he asked, holding the half-completed item up for her perusal.

“I know so,” she said firmly, fingering the delicate material before laughing.

“What’s so amusing, love?” he asked.

“I’m just imagining telling that swaggering, innuendo laden pirate I climbed the beanstalk with that one day he’d not only settle down, but lead a crocheting circle with the local ladies.”

 Notes:

–Apologies for the shamefully long time in between updates. I got busy with other projects, and then I kind of forgot this story even existed. That combined with my muse being on strike led to an almost 8 month hiatus, such that I would be surprised if ANY of you even remember what happened in part 1.

–I just returned from a vacation with @kmomof4, @jrob63 and @snowbellewells, and it’s amazing what a little down time with fandom friends can do to get the writing juices flowing again! I will do my best to be less of a stranger in the future!

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[turnpage]

send me a ✐ for a random sentence starter from my muse (1-1500) — tw: profanity, mild nsfw, long list

generator here quotes compiled from here inspired by

feel free to change to fit your preferences as need.

❨1❩ ❛ They are dreams, but I’m too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I’ve already lost too much to let them take over. ❜
 ❨2❩ ❛ Sometimes human places create inhuman monsters. ❜ ❨3❩ ❛ I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in. ❜ ❨4❩ ❛ Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win. ❜ ❨5❩ ❛ The world's a hard place. It doesn't care. It doesn't hate you and me, but it doesn't love us, either. ❜ ❨6❩ ❛ The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge. ❜ ❨7❩ ❛ Pull your act together and just go on. ❜ ❨8❩ ❛ I had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there is nothing physically wrong. I hurt all the time. ❜ ❨9❩ ❛ Tough old world, baby. If you're not bolted together tightly, you're gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty. ❜ ❨10❩ ❛ Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford? ❜ ❨11❩ ❛ Truth comes out. In the end it always comes out. ❜ ❨12❩ ❛ Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are. ❜ ❨13❩ ❛ No matter where you go, the same asshole gets off the plane. ❜ ❨14❩ ❛ We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives. ❜ ❨15❩ ❛ That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. ❜ ❨16❩ ❛ Human nature, baby. Grab it and growl. ❜ ❨17❩ ❛ God wiped snot out of his nose and that was you. ❜ ❨18❩ ❛ Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you. ❜ ❨19❩ ❛ How many times, over how many years, have I—a grown adult—asked for the mercy of another chance? ❜ ❨20❩ ❛ I was suddenly so sick of myself, so revolted. ❜ ❨21❩ ❛ You listen to me. I’m going to talk to you about it this once and never again this same way. ❜ ❨22❩ ❛ But those pieces, they’ll never fit just the same way again. Never in this world. ❜ ❨23❩ ❛ Dying is a part of living. You have to keep tuning in to that if you expect to be a whole person. ❜ ❨24❩ ❛ Officious little prick. ❜ ❨25❩ ❛ I’ve been sleepwalking again, my dear. — The plants are moving under the rug. ❜ ❨26❩ ❛ How I wish you were fear. ❜ ❨27❩ ❛ But it was a dreadful kind of curiosity, the kind that makes you peek through your fingers during the scariest parts of a scary movie. ❜ ❨28❩ ❛ All we have is time, you know. An eternity of time. Or shall we end it? Might as well. After all, we're missing the party. ❜ ❨29❩ ❛ We all remember our pleasant dreams more clearly than the scary ones. ❜ ❨30❩ ❛ The way things should be and the way things are hardly ever get together. ❜ ❨31❩ ❛ Got to be regular if you want to be happy. ❜ ❨32❩ ❛ But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. ❜ ❨33❩ ❛ He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none. ❜ ❨34❩ ❛ Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep. ❜ ❨35❩ ❛ It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment's carelessness.  ❜ ❨36❩ ❛ If I had ever believed it, I no longer do. ❜ ❨37❩ ❛ I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands. ❜ ❨38❩ ❛ I cannot bear this world a moment longer. ❜ ❨39❩ ❛ I have a better idea. I will do as I please. ❜ ❨40❩ ❛ All my life has been murk and depths, but I am not a part of that dark water. I am a creature within it. ❜ ❨41❩ ❛ You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see. ❜ ❨42❩ ❛ When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world. ❜ ❨43❩ ❛ When I was born, the word for what I was did not exist. ❜ ❨44❩ ❛ But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults. ❜ ❨45❩ ❛ I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. ❜ ❨46❩ ❛ This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive. ❜ ❨47❩ ❛ You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you. ❜ ❨48❩ ❛ Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me. ❜ ❨49❩ ❛ If now I am wise, it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes. ❜ ❨50❩ ❛ You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite. ❜ ❨51❩ ❛ Give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for. ❜ ❨52❩ ❛ I have been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that is only a shape I’ve been poured into. I do not have to keep it. ❜ ❨53❩ ❛ I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. ❜ ❨54❩ ❛ Understanding the world is a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves. ❜ ❨55❩ ❛ Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two. ❜ ❨56❩ ❛ The truth is, men make terrible pigs. ❜ ❨57❩ ❛ My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it. ❜ ❨58❩ ❛ This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh. ❜ ❨59❩ ❛ Witches are not so delicate. ❜ ❨60❩ ❛ Those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats. ❜ ❨61❩ ❛ I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. ❜ ❨62❩ ❛ There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too. ❜ ❨63❩ ❛ The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them. ❜ ❨64❩ ❛ Life is warped. I'm just in sync. ❜ ❨65❩ ❛ Now it's a whisper from the past. ❜ ❨66❩ ❛ But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more. ❜ ❨67❩ ❛ Why is it always such a surprise? The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush. ❜ ❨68❩ ❛ Perfection exacts a price, but it's the imperfect who pay it. ❜ ❨69❩ ❛ What is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?  ❜ ❨70❩ ❛ I have scars, inside me. ❜ ❨71❩ ❛ The dead are not entirely dead but are alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. ❜ ❨72❩ ❛ However dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void. ❜ ❨73❩ ❛ Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic. ❜ ❨74❩ ❛ It is another way of saying tough luck. To people you aren’t going to help out. ❜ ❨75❩ ❛ I'm waiting, far off in the future. ❜ ❨76❩ ❛ The only sure camouflage is unpredictability. ❜ ❨77❩ ❛ There are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. ❜ ❨78❩ ❛ First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled. ❜ ❨79❩ ❛ I long to swim in liquid moonlight. ❜ ❨80❩ ❛ That's right, I don’t like to be summoned on trivial matters. ❜ ❨81❩ ❛ The part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. ❜ ❨82❩ ❛ Cut that part out of us: the grinning, elemental malice. Begin us anew. ❜ ❨83❩ ❛ Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot. ❜ ❨84❩ ❛ At last. It's you. ❜ ❨85❩ ❛ No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish. ❜ ❨86❩ ❛ Take what the moment offers. Don’t close doors. Be thankful. ❜ ❨87❩ ❛ How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. ❜ ❨88❩ ❛ Is it disapproval or extreme lust? With some men it’s hard to tell the difference. ❜ ❨89❩ ❛ My hair was driving me crazy, but then … I died. ❜ ❨90❩ ❛ Seek and ye shall find, eventually. And you found. You’re right, I don’t dispute that. Sorry. ❜ ❨91❩ ❛ Everything digests, and is digested. ❜ ❨92❩ ❛ My head was once a filing cabinet. Now it’s a flurry of papers, floating on a draft. ❜ ❨93❩ ❛ You cannot keep bumping your head against reality and saying it is not there. ❜ ❨94❩ ❛ I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s something nobody knows about. ❜ ❨95❩ ❛ And if I don’t want to die, I’ve got to start living. ❜ ❨96❩ ❛ The world is a beautiful place. Don’t forget that. And don’t miss it. ❜ ❨97❩ ❛ I was fighting for my life. So I must not want to die. ❜ ❨98❩ ❛ Something’s happening to me, through me, something dangerous and new. ❜ ❨99❩ ❛ It’s taken root, a poison tree; it’s grown, fanning out, vines winding round my gut, my lungs, my heart. ❜ ❨100❩ ❛ We’re interpreters. We’re translators. ❜ ❨101❩ ❛ You’ll notice I’m not asking what made you this way. ❜ ❨102❩ ❛ No family, happy or unhappy, is quite like any other. Tolstoy was chock-fullo’shit. Remember that. ❜ ❨103❩ ❛ We lived in monochrome those nights. ❜ ❨104❩ ❛ You live in a dream. You’re a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? ❜ ❨105❩ ❛ Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you’d find swine? ❜ ❨106❩ ❛ I stand here in the dark: cold, utterly alone, full of fear and something that feels like longing. ❜ ❨107❩ ❛ The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. ❜ ❨108❩ ❛ Not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye. ❜ ❨109❩ ❛ Selective emotional detachment. ❜ ❨110❩ ❛ Not for me, or at least not today. ❜ ❨111❩ ❛ Dead but not gone, watching life surge forward around me, powerless to intervene. ❜ ❨112❩ ❛ Do I sound like a hillbilly saying that? ❜ ❨113❩ ❛ Remember, you’ve got your secret weapon. ❜ ❨114❩ ❛ The dream drains away like water. The memory, really. I try to scoop it up in my palms, but it’s gone. ❜ ❨115❩ ❛ My shadow stretches along the carpet, as though trying to detach itself from me. ❜ ❨116❩ ❛ It curls away from me, like blood in water. ❜ ❨117❩ ❛ It’s been so long since I felt the rain. Or wind—the caress of wind. ❜ ❨118❩ ❛ But snow I never want to feel again. ❜ ❨119❩ ❛ Through adversity to the stars. ❜ ❨120❩ ❛ No hero. No sleuth. I am locked in. I am locked out. ❜ ❨121❩ ❛ Thinking hasn't gotten me anywhere so far. ❜ ❨122❩ ❛ The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you. ❜ ❨123❩ ❛ Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. ❜ ❨124❩ ❛ Women get consumed. ❜ ❨125❩ ❛ Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them. ❜ ❨126❩ ❛ A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort. ❜ ❨127❩ ❛ Safer to be feared than loved. ❜ ❨128❩ ❛ I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence. ❜ ❨129❩ ❛ It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wish I could stop trying. ❜ ❨130❩ ❛ I always feel sad for the girl that I was. ❜ ❨131❩ ❛ Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes. ❜ ❨132❩ ❛ How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen. ❜ ❨133❩ ❛ See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was. ❜ ❨134❩ ❛ Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand. ❜ ❨135❩ ❛ To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting. ❜ ❨136❩ ❛ I'm here. I don't usually feel that I am. ❜ ❨137❩ ❛ I'm tired of dying. ❜ ❨138❩ ❛ What if you hurt because it feels so good? ❜ ❨139❩ ❛ How confusing to live in the shadow of a shadow. ❜ ❨140❩ ❛ Do you ever feel like bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them? You can’t do anything, you just have to wait? ❜ ❨141❩ ❛ Sometimes my scars have a mind of their own. ❜ ❨142❩ ❛ Everyone has their own version of a memory. ❜ ❨143❩ ❛ Isn’t a smile a girl’s best weapon? ❜ ❨144❩ ❛ My sense of weightlessness, I think, comes from the fact that I know so little about my past. ❜ ❨145❩ ❛ Do what I want; I might like you. ❜ ❨146❩ ❛ I feel sorry for Persephone because even when she’s back with the living, people are afraid of her because of where’s she’s been. ❜ ❨147❩ ❛ She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. ❜ ❨148❩ ❛ The sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human. ❜ ❨149❩ ❛ It infects you. It ruined me. ❜ ❨150❩ ❛ Your health is not a debt you just cancel. The body collects. ❜ ❨151❩ ❛ Men love to put things inside women, don’t they? ❜ ❨152❩ ❛ We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. ❜ ❨153❩ ❛ Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women. ❜ ❨154❩ ❛ The strongest of all warriors are these two — time and patience. ❜ ❨155❩ ❛ If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war. ❜ ❨156❩ ❛ There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth. ❜ ❨157❩ ❛ The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness. ❜ ❨158❩ ❛ Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy. ❜ ❨159❩ ❛ It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong. ❜ ❨160❩ ❛ You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. ❜ ❨161❩ ❛ If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed. ❜ ❨162❩ ❛ We are asleep until we fall in love! ❜ ❨163❩ ❛ I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. ❜ ❨164❩ ❛ Everything I know, I know because of love. ❜ ❨165❩ ❛ Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. ❜ ❨166❩ ❛ If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. ❜ ❨167❩ ❛ Yes, love, but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. ❜ ❨168❩ ❛ How can one be well...when one suffers morally? ❜ ❨169❩ ❛ Kings are the slaves of history. ❜ ❨170❩ ❛ God is the same everywhere. ❜ ❨171❩ ❛ Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy. ❜ ❨172❩ ❛ One must be cunning and wicked in this world. ❜ ❨173❩ ❛ We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them. ❜ ❨174❩ ❛ When one's head is gone one doesn't weep over one's hair! ❜ ❨175❩ ❛ For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed? ❜ ❨176❩ ❛ He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died. ❜ ❨177❩ ❛ Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps. ❜ ❨178❩ ❛ Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible. ❜ ❨179❩ ❛ The distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable. ❜ ❨180❩ ❛ How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? ❜ ❨181❩ ❛ The wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe. ❜ ❨182❩ ❛ When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. ❜ ❨183❩ ❛ My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: the parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely. ❜ ❨184❩ ❛ Would it be worse to love someone who is no longer there, or not to love someone who is? ❜ ❨185❩ ❛ Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness. ❜ ❨186❩ ❛ It is not that I was credulous, simply that I believed in all things dark and dangerous. ❜ ❨187❩ ❛ Sometimes you do things you regret, but there's nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on. ❜ ❨188❩ ❛ Love will be an impulse that will inspire and ruin in equal measure. ❜ ❨189❩ ❛ He died alone. It don't matter a rat's ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone. ❜ ❨190❩ ❛ It was love, I knew, and it tasted like champagne in my mind. ❜ ❨191❩ ❛ The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck. ❜ ❨192❩ ❛ She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble. ❜ ❨193❩ ❛ Daylight is always safe. ❜ ❨194❩ ❛ If not for death, they'd be content to simply exist, but with death, well, their lives will have meaning. ❜ ❨195❩ ❛ You want to know the future, love? Then wait. ❜ ❨196❩ ❛ There are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm. ❜ ❨197❩ ❛ Fairy tales are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated ❜ ❨198❩ ❛ But sometimes you leave blood on your instruments. ❜ ❨199❩ ❛ I'd like to be a wolf. Not all the time. Just sometimes. In the dark. I would run through the forests. ❜ ❨200❩ ❛ You've seen them. They have mouths that twitch, and eyes that stare, and they babble and they mewl and they whimper. ❜ ❨201❩ ❛ They are not mad, or rather, the loss of their sanity is the lesser of their problems. ❜ ❨202❩ ❛ Good a reason for writing as I know: releasing demons, letting them fly. ❜ ❨203❩ ❛ That miserable state in which everything seems flat and of equal importance; when nothing matters, and in which reality seems scraped thin and threadbare. ❜ ❨204❩ ❛ Someone had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the metal: JUST DIE, it said. Like it is easy. ❜ ❨205❩ ❛ Winter started today. The sky turned grey and the snow began to fall and it did not stop falling until well after dark. ❜ ❨206❩ ❛ Memory is the great deceiver. ❜ ❨207❩ ❛ Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. ❜ ❨208❩ ❛ I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control.  ❜ ❨209❩ ❛ If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. ❜ ❨210❩ ❛ I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other. ❜ ❨211❩ ❛ But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. ❜ ❨212❩ ❛ I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other would have borne it. ❜ ❨213❩ ❛ There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves. ❜ ❨214❩ ❛ One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. ❜ ❨215❩ ❛ Better be without sense than misapply it as you do. ❜ ❨216❩ ❛ You must be the best judge of your own happiness. ❜ ❨217❩ ❛ Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing ; but I have never been in love ; it is not my way, or my nature ; and I do not think I ever shall. ❜ ❨218❩ ❛ Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise. ❜ ❨219❩ ❛ If I have not spoken, it is because I am afraid I will awaken myself from this dream. ❜ ❨220❩ ❛ If a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. ❜ ❨221❩ ❛ Faultless in spite of all her faults. ❜ ❨222❩ ❛ A heroine whom no one but myself will much like. ❜ ❨223❩ ❛ There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart. ❜ ❨224❩ ❛ Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its fragrance on the desert air. ❜ ❨225❩ ❛ I pity you. I thought you cleverer. ❜ ❨226❩ ❛ Evil to some is always good to others. ❜ ❨227❩ ❛ I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do. ❜ ❨228❩ ❛ She is loveliness itself. ❜ ❨229❩ ❛ Time does not compose me. ❜ ❨230❩ ❛ A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her. ❜ ❨231❩ ❛ I do not find myself making any use of the word sacrifice. ❜ ❨232❩ ❛ I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be any more. ❜ ❨233❩ ❛ I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment. ❜ ❨234❩ ❛ I examined my own heart. And there you were. Never, I fear, to be removed. ❜ ❨235❩ ❛ With all your little faults, you are an excellent creature. ❜ ❨236❩ ❛ You have another long walk before you. ❜ ❨237❩ ❛ The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. ❜ ❨238❩ ❛ What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? ❜ ❨239❩ ❛ Out of the frying pan into the fire! ❜ ❨240❩ ❛ We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity. ❜ ❨241❩ ❛ She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. ❜ ❨242❩ ❛ And, oh, God . . . how frequently I weep! ❜ ❨243❩ ❛ From the coffin of your madness there is no escape. ❜ ❨244❩ ❛ I am feeling supernatural tonight. I want to eat diamonds. ❜ ❨245❩ ❛ All the same there is a chance that if we keep on shaking our chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles will part. ❜ ❨246❩ ❛ It was sad music fit to make you cut your throat. ❜ ❨247❩ ❛ Nothing is more boring than being forced to play. ❜ ❨248❩ ❛ Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest? ❜ ❨249❩ ❛ Wherein does a woman’s honour reside? In her vagina or in her spirit? ❜ ❨250❩ ❛ Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment! ❜ ❨251❩ ❛ Have you ever stared stark failure in the face? The trick is to outstare it. ❜ ❨252❩ ❛ Sometimes it seems that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the one who will wear them, who will bring them to life. ❜ ❨253❩ ❛ I have the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet I exist. ❜ ❨254❩ ❛ I felt myself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea. ❜ ❨255❩ ❛ She looks wonderful, but she doesn't look right. ❜ ❨256❩ ❛ The one-eyed man will be King in the country of the blind. ❜ ❨257❩ ❛ I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs! ❜ ❨258❩ ❛ I love to hear my bones rattle. That’s how I know I’m alive. ❜ ❨259❩ ❛ I learnt, first, as the birds do, from the birds. ❜ ❨260❩ ❛ Inside and outside match exactly, but both are badly wrong. ❜ ❨261❩ ❛ During the less-than-blink of time it took the last chime to die, there came a vertiginous sensation. ❜ ❨262❩ ❛ I fear a wound not of the body but the soul, an irreconcilable division between myself and the rest of humankind. ❜ ❨263❩ ❛ I fear the proof of my own singularity. ❜ ❨264❩ ❛ Still nothing could calm the fearful storm in my erupting skin. ❜ ❨265❩ ❛ Petersburg, loveliest of all hallucinations. ❜ ❨266❩ ❛ A breathless second between black forest and the frozen sea. ❜ ❨267❩ ❛ I'm beginning to feel totally cut off from the world. ❜ ❨268❩ ❛ What does this all mean? Where are we? ❜ ❨269❩ ❛ Sometimes I bleed. ❜ ❨270❩ ❛ If you see a ghost, you say "hello". ❜ ❨271❩ ❛ The war is not over. ❜ ❨272❩ ❛ You're not going. You left us once already. ❜ ❨273❩ ❛ You can’t go! ❜ ❨274❩ ❛ I loved you, but that wasn't enough, was it? ❜ ❨275❩ ❛ If you're dead, then leave me in peace. ❜ ❨276❩ ❛ The only thing that moves here is the light, but it changes everything. ❜ ❨277❩ ❛ I won't ask for forgiveness for something I didn't do! ❜ ❨278❩ ❛ Sometimes the world of the living gets mixed up with the world of the dead. ❜ ❨279❩ ❛ Death of a loved one can lead people to do the strangest things. ❜ ❨280❩ ❛ Sooner or later, they will find you. ❜ ❨281❩ ❛ They're everywhere - they say this house is theirs. ❜ ❨282❩ ❛ You're always teasing me, and telling lies. I'm sick of it. ❜ ❨283❩ ❛ Others will come. Sometimes we'll sense them. Other times, we won't. ❜ ❨284❩ ❛ No crying now. No crying. Stop that. Here. Look what an awful face you've got when you cry. ❜ ❨285❩ ❛ You listen to me. I've seen them too. ❜ ❨286❩ ❛ You'll see. There are going to be some big surprises. There are going to be... changes. ❜ ❨287❩ ❛ Why did you go and fight that stupid war that had nothing to do with us? Why didn't you stay like the others did? ❜ ❨288❩ ❛ Your place was here with your family. ❜ ❨289❩ ❛ So you say you know this house well? ❜ ❨290❩ ❛ I wasn't expecting you so soon. ❜ ❨291❩ ❛ What's the matter? Has the cat got your tongue? ❜ ❨292❩ ❛ You mean they just vanished? Into thin air? ❜ ❨293❩ ❛ No door must be opened without the previous one being closed first. ❜ ❨294❩ ❛ Here, most of the time, you can hardly see your way. ❜ ❨295❩ ❛ Whatever you do, don't open the curtains. ❜ ❨296❩ ❛ Now, come on. Eyes closed. ❜ ❨297❩ ❛ We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. ❜ ❨298❩ ❛ By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be. ❜ ❨299❩ ❛ I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. ❜ ❨300❩ ❛ And the reasons? There are no reasons. ❜ ❨301❩ ❛ Love does not exist, it's like religion, made to control you. ❜ ❨302❩ ❛ After all, we're not fucking stupid. At least, we're not that fucking stupid. ❜ ❨303❩ ❛ You fucking knew that fucking cunt would fuck some cunt. ❜ ❨304❩ ❛ Everything in the street today seems soft focus. ❜ ❨305❩ ❛ What does that make us? The lowest of the low. ❜ ❨306❩ ❛ Take your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you're still fuckin’ miles off the pace. ❜ ❨307❩ ❛ It’s as if everything is a copy of what you knew before, similar, yet somehow lacking in its usual qualities, a bit like the way things are in a dream. ❜ ❨308❩ ❛ It’s all okay, it’s all beautiful; but I fear that this internal sea is going to subside soon, leaving this poisonous shite washed up, stranded up in my body. ❜ ❨309❩ ❛ It cuts me up. It confuses me. ❜ ❨310❩ ❛ It's not funny laughter. This is lynch mob laughter. ❜ ❨311❩ ❛ Protect me from those who wish to help us. ❜ ❨312❩ ❛ They mean well, and they mean well to me, but there's no way under the sun that they can appreciate what I feel, what I need. ❜ ❨313❩ ❛ The pit of melancholy is a bottomless one, and I am descending fast. ❜ ❨314❩ ❛ Living like this is a full-time business. ❜ ❨315❩ ❛ I’ll stand or fall alone. ❜ ❨316❩ ❛ We are no wiser now than at the start. ❜ ❨317❩ ❛ This is pathetic, and fucking boring. ❜ ❨318❩ ❛ Death is usually a process, rather than an event. ❜ ❨319❩ ❛ We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? ❜ ❨320❩ ❛ We are all acquaintances now. ❜ ❨321❩ ❛ The problem is that this beautiful ocean carries with it loads of poisonous flotsam and jetsam. ❜ ❨322❩ ❛ Life is beautiful. I'm going to enjoy it, and I'm going to have a long life. ❜ ❨323❩ ❛ The grim reality of impending death can be talked away by trying to invest in the present reality of life. ❜ ❨324❩ ❛ There must be more to life than this. ❜ ❨325❩ ❛ We all see what we want to see. ❜ ❨326❩ ❛ Statistically speaking, you're more likely to be killed by a member of your own family or a close friend, than by anyone else. ❜ ❨327❩ ❛ What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question. ❜ ❨328❩ ❛ Maybe that's what love is: it's being pissed off. ❜ ❨329❩ ❛ You can forget who you are if you're alone too much. ❜ ❨330❩ ❛ Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God. ❜ ❨331❩ ❛ Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly.  ❜ ❨332❩ ❛ We must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing. ❜ ❨333❩ ❛ Everyone wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing. ❜ ❨334❩ ❛ We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young. ❜ ❨335❩ ❛ How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it. ❜ ❨336❩ ❛ Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering: Mine! Mine! ❜ ❨337❩ ❛ All creatures know that some must die ; that all the rest may take and eat. ❜ ❨338❩ ❛ Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? ❜ ❨339❩ ❛ Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance. ❜ ❨340❩ ❛ Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy? ❜ ❨341❩ ❛ Love is useless, it leads you into dumb exchanges in which you give too much away, and then you get bitter and mean. ❜ ❨342❩ ❛ Maybe sadness is a kind of hunger. Maybe the two go together. ❜ ❨343❩ ❛ Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody -- a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules. ❜ ❨344❩ ❛ If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time. ❜ ❨345❩ ❛ You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them. ❜ ❨346❩ ❛ I'm fine, for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in. ❜ ❨347❩ ❛ Because if you can't wish, why bother? ❜ ❨348❩ ❛ It's better to hope than mope! ❜ ❨349❩ ❛ Reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows. ❜ ❨350❩ ❛ In any case, time is not a thing that passes, it’s a sea on which you float. ❜ ❨351❩ ❛ I know I’m deceiving myself, but I prefer to deceive myself. I desperately need to believe such pure joy is still possible. ❜ ❨352❩ ❛ Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered. ❜ ❨353❩ ❛ Behind my eyelids I saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned. ❜ ❨354❩ ❛ ‘Why can't I believe?’ I asked the darkness. ❜ ❨355❩ ❛ Everyone’s too sad for everything. ❜ ❨356❩ ❛ If you can’t stop the waves, go sailing. ❜ ❨357❩ ❛ I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary. ❜ ❨358❩ ❛ Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. ❜ ❨359❩ ❛ In the end, we'll all become stories. ❜ ❨360❩ ❛ I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead. ❜ ❨361❩ ❛ If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. ❜ ❨362❩ ❛ If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. ❜ ❨363❩ ❛ Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results. ❜ ❨364❩ ❛ Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been. ❜ ❨365❩ ❛ Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? ❜ ❨366❩ ❛ We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly. ❜ ❨367❩ ❛ If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon? ❜ ❨368❩ ❛ You fit into me like a hook into an eye. ❜ ❨369❩ ❛ Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened. ❜ ❨370❩ ❛ Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. ❜ ❨371❩ ❛ Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. ❜ ❨372❩ ❛ This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons. ❜ ❨373❩ ❛ Get rid of death. Make it be spring. ❜ ❨374❩ ❛ You are innocent as a bathtub full of bullets. ❜ ❨375❩ ❛ I am the space you desecrate as you pass through. ❜ ❨376❩ ❛ Favour me and give me riches, destroy my enemies. Save me from death. ❜ ❨377❩ ❛ She is a raw voice loose in the rooms beneath me. ❜ ❨378❩ ❛ Isn't the moon warm enough for you, why do you need the blanket of another body? ❜ ❨379❩ ❛ This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn. ❜ ❨380❩ ❛ If you look long enough eventually you will see me. ❜ ❨381❩ ❛ I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head. ❜ ❨382❩ ❛ I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief. ❜ ❨383❩ ❛ But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling. ❜ ❨384❩ ❛ How else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin? ❜ ❨385❩ ❛ What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question. ❜ ❨386❩ ❛ Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything. ❜ ❨387❩ ❛ We loved with a love that was more than love. ❜ ❨388❩ ❛ Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. ❜ ❨389❩ ❛ The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? ❜ ❨390❩ ❛ There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion. ❜ ❨391❩ ❛ Never to suffer would never to have been blessed. ❜ ❨392❩ ❛ Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear. ❜ ❨393❩ ❛ And all I loved, I loved alone. ❜ ❨394❩ ❛ Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute. ❜ ❨395❩ ❛ The best things in life make you sweaty. ❜ ❨396❩ ❛ There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. ❜ ❨397❩ ❛ Anything is better than this agony. ❜ ❨398❩ ❛ You fancy me mad. ❜ ❨399❩ ❛ I hear all things in the heaven and in the earth. ❜ ❨400❩ ❛ Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? ❜ ❨401❩ ❛ Leave my loneliness unbroken! ❜ ❨402❩ ❛ A more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrills every fibre of my frame. ❜ ❨403❩ ❛ The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. ❜ ❨404❩ ❛ Let my heart be still a moment. ❜ ❨405❩ ❛ You call it hope —  It is but agony of desire. ❜ ❨406❩ ❛ Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? ❜ ❨407❩ ❛ To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths! ❜ ❨408❩ ❛ The beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage. ❜ ❨409❩ ❛ Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive. ❜ ❨410❩ ❛ I have been happy, though in a dream. ❜ ❨411❩ ❛ Nevermore. ❜ ❨412❩ ❛ The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life. ❜ ❨413❩ ❛ I am convinced that every thing is going wrong. ❜ ❨414❩ ❛ The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls. ❜ ❨415❩ ❛ And if I died, at least I will have died for you! ❜ ❨416❩ ❛ It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. ❜ ❨417❩ ❛ Hurt and humiliation — But this, I can not take. ❜ ❨418❩ ❛ The walls in there have ears. ❜ ❨419❩ ❛ This is for your ears only. ❜ ❨420❩ ❛ What is it? You have me scared. ❜ ❨421❩ ❛ Whoever isn’t for us, is against us. ❜ ❨422❩ ❛ You are just a body; to be dumped, disposed of like a carcass, left out for the birds to feed on. ❜ ❨423❩ ❛ The dead will have to forgive me. ❜ ❨424❩ ❛ From now on and no matter how your mind may I change, I will not accept your help. ❜ ❨425❩ ❛ If death comes, so be it. There will be glory in it. ❜ ❨426❩ ❛ Live, then; and live with your choice. ❜ ❨427❩ ❛ I am doing what has to be done. ❜ ❨428❩ ❛ Nothing is going to stop the ones that love you from keeping on loving you. ❜ ❨429❩ ❛ Worst is the man who has all the good advice, and then because his nerve fails, fails to act in accordance with it, as a leader should. ❜ ❨430❩ ❛ Only a loony would walk himself into this. ❜ ❨431❩ ❛ Why do you need such fences and defences? ❜ ❨432❩ ❛ Enough. Do not anger me. ❜ ❨433❩ ❛ The gods, you think, will side with the likes of him? ❜ ❨434❩ ❛ Watch it. You are over stepping. ❜ ❨435❩ ❛ I warn you. You should keep a civil tongue. ❜ ❨436❩ ❛ There is no such thing as an oath the can not be broken. ❜ ❨437❩ ❛ Every now and then, the things you’d hardly let yourself imagine, actually happen. ❜ ❨438❩ ❛ And you stand over this? This is the truth? ❜ ❨439❩ ❛ The bigger the resistance, the bigger the collapse. ❜ ❨440❩ ❛ Iron that’s forged the hardest, snaps the quickest. ❜ ❨441❩ ❛ Even the wildest horses come to heel when they are reined & bitted right. ❜ ❨442❩ ❛ That’s how guilt affects some people. They break and everything comes out. ❜ ❨443❩ ❛ Will it be enough for you? To see me executed? ❜ ❨444❩ ❛ So you know something no one else knows? ❜ ❨445❩ ❛ They know it too. They are just too afraid to say it. ❜ ❨446❩ ❛ If you die, how will I keep on living? ❜ ❨447❩ ❛ There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'. ❜ ❨448❩ ❛ How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. ❜ ❨449❩ ❛ Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body. ❜ ❨450❩ ❛ I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me. ❜ ❨451❩ ❛ For this moment, this one moment, we are together.  ❜ ❨452❩ ❛ Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. ❜ ❨453❩ ❛ I am as neat as a cat in my habits. ❜ ❨454❩ ❛ Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me. ❜ ❨455❩ ❛ I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room. ❜ ❨456❩ ❛ We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe ❨457❩ that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie ❨458❩ asleep. ❜ ❨459❩ ❛ These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom. ❜ ❨460❩ ❛ Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. ❜ ❨461❩ ❛ The moment is all; the moment is enough. ❜ ❨462❩ ❛ I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given. ❜ ❨463❩ ❛ I am not one and simple, but complex and many. ❜ ❨464❩ ❛ And if you are dead, I shall weep. ❜ ❨465❩ ❛ But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful. ❜ ❨466❩ ❛ But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love. ❜ ❨467❩ ❛ I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams. ❜ ❨468❩ ❛ Life is a dream surely. ❜ ❨469❩ ❛ I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. ❜ ❨470❩ ❛ Oh, I am in love with life! ❜ ❨471❩ ❛ I have been knotted; I have been torn apart. ❜ ❨472❩ ❛ There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death. ❜ ❨473❩ ❛ I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am. ❜ ❨474❩ ❛ I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me. ❜ ❨475❩ ❛ I am above the earth now. I am no longer upright, to be knocked against and damaged. ❜ ❨476❩ ❛ I see it all. I feel it all. ❜ ❨477❩ ❛ Death is woven in with the violets. Death and again death. ❜ ❨478❩ ❛ We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember. ❜ ❨479❩ ❛ If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged. ❜ ❨480❩ ❛ When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass. ❜ ❨481❩ ❛ Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word; - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase.  ❜ ❨482❩ ❛ Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor. ❜ ❨483❩ ❛ If the world treats you well, you come to believe you are deserving of it. ❜ ❨484❩ ❛ If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go. ❜ ❨485❩ ❛ It’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength. ❜ ❨486❩ ❛ There is no fool like an educated fool. ❜ ❨487❩ ❛ There are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. ❜ ❨488❩ ❛ I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened. ❜ ❨489❩ ❛ Underneath it all is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful. ❜ ❨490❩ ❛ And underneath all that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but ripe and splitting open of its own accord.  ❜ ❨491❩ ❛ The small details of life often hide a great significance. ❜ ❨492❩ ❛ Guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that others have done to you. ❜ ❨493❩ ❛ I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once? ❜ ❨494❩ ❛ It is always a mistake to curse back openly at those who are stronger than you unless there is a fence between. ❜ ❨495❩ ❛ Some call this "Eve's curse," but I think that is stupid because the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam. ❜ ❨496❩ ❛ I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again. ❜ ❨497❩ ❛ I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely. ❜ ❨498❩ ❛ If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one. ❜ ❨499❩ ❛ It’s as if I never existed, because no trace of me remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed. It is almost the same as being innocent. ❜ ❨500❩ ❛ Today you wear your habitual expression of strained anxiety; you smell of violets. ❜ ❨501❩ ❛ Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude. ❜ ❨502❩ ❛ I wonder what would become of me, and comfort myself that in a hundred years I will be dead and at peace. ❜ ❨503❩ ❛ For it is not always the one that strikes the blow that is the actual murderer. ❜ ❨504❩ ❛ There is a “do this” or “do that” with God, but not any “because”. ❜ ❨505❩ ❛ If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything. ❜ ❨506❩ ❛ They say, why don’t you ever smile or laugh, we never see you smiling, and I say I suppose I have gotten out of the way of it, my face won’t bend in that direction any more. ❜ ❨507❩ ❛ I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out. ❜ ❨508❩ ❛ I see what you’re after. You are a collector. You think all you have to do is give me an apple, and then you can collect me. ❜ ❨509❩ ❛ If you want to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before you have made the same life choice. ❜ ❨510❩ ❛ Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo. ❜ ❨511❩ ❛ Nature is to zoos as God is to churches. ❜ ❨512❩ ❛ After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? ❜ ❨513❩ ❛ There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive. ❜ ❨514❩ ❛ These things sneak up on me for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency. ❜ ❨515❩ ❛ Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast. ❜ ❨516❩ ❛ You can’t buy it, but it has a price. Everything has a price. ❜ ❨517❩ ❛ As a species were doomed by hope, then? You could call it hope. That, or desperation. ❜ ❨518❩ ❛ I am not my childhood. ❜ ❨519❩ ❛ Human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else and live on forever. ❜ ❨520❩ ❛ “I'll make you mine”, lovers said in old books. They never said, “I'll make you me.” ❜ ❨521❩ ❛ How much is too much, how far is too far? ❜ ❨522❩ ❛ Expectation isn't the same as desire. ❜ ❨523❩ ❛ Why not cut to the chase? ❜ ❨524❩ ❛ Maybe there aren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. ❜ ❨525❩ ❛ I thought you didn’t believe in God. ❜ ❨526❩ ❛ I need at least the illusion of being understood. ❜ ❨527❩ ❛ What change would have altered the course of events? In the big picture, nothing. In the small picture, so much. ❜ ❨528❩ ❛ You are only looking at the dirt under your feet. It's not good for you. ❜ ❨529❩ ❛ I like to keep only the bright side of myself turned towards you.  ❜ ❨530❩ ❛ Grief in the face of inevitable death. The wish to stop time. The human condition. ❜ ❨531❩ ❛ So many crucial events take place behind people’s backs, when they aren’t in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. ❜ ❨532❩ ❛ Would you kill someone you loved to spare them pain? ❜ ❨533❩ ❛ When the water’s moving faster than the boat, you can’t control a thing. ❜ ❨534❩ ❛ Don't be so fucking sentimental. ❜ ❨535❩ ❛ Wrong, as usual. ❜ ❨536❩ ❛ Why do you want to talk about ugly things? ❜ ❨537❩ ❛ I understand why serial killers send helpful clues to the police. ❜ ❨538❩ ❛ Take your time, leave mine alone. ❜ ❨539❩ ❛ You will hear thunder and remember me. ❜ ❨540❩ ❛ If you were music, I would listen to you ceaselessly. ❜ ❨541❩ ❛ I seem to myself an accidental guest in this dreadful body. ❜ ❨542❩ ❛ Call me a sinner, mock me maliciously. ❜ ❨543❩ ❛ I, from the very beginning, seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium. Or a reflection in someone else's mirror. Without flesh, without meaning, without a name. ❜ ❨544❩ ❛ I knew the list of crimes that I was destined to commit. ❜ ❨545❩ ❛ The future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future. ❜ ❨546❩ ❛ You are untranslatable into any one tongue. ❜ ❨547❩ ❛ I was hoping my silence would fit yours. ❜ ❨548❩ ❛ See, we were never about butterflies. All about us is unearthly and radiant. ❜ ❨549❩ ❛ You do not know just what you've been forgiven. ❜ ❨550❩ ❛ I need to slaughter my memory.  ❜ ❨551❩ ❛ Forgive me that I appeared to you in waking dreams. ❜ ❨552❩ ❛ I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy. ❜ ❨553❩ ❛ I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death. ❜ ❨554❩ ❛ Wild honey smells of freedom. But gold smells of nothing. ❜ ❨555❩ ❛ You are three times more beautiful than angels. ❜ ❨556❩ ❛ I will kill you without spilling your blood on the ground, not touching you with my hand, not giving you one glance. ❜ ❨557❩ ❛ You invented me. There is no such earthly being. ❜ ❨558❩ ❛ You’re late. Way too late. I’m glad to see you, nonetheless. ❜ ❨559❩ ❛ Forgive me that I felt forsaken. Forgive me that I kept mistaking too many others for you. ❜ ❨560❩ ❛ Real tenderness can’t be confused, it’s quiet and can’t be heard. ❜ ❨561❩ ❛ What else lived in that house besides us? ❜ ❨562❩ ❛ How unhappy we are together! ❜ ❨563❩ ❛ I defend not my voice, but my silence. ❜ ❨564❩ ❛ Without love, I'm more at ease, I'm sure. ❜ ❨565❩ ❛ I've got no more tears or explanations. ❜ ❨566❩ ❛ I’m not complaining. Happiness is not for me. ❜ ❨567❩ ❛ Are you not the only tie between good and evil, earthly pits and paradise? ❜ ❨568❩ ❛ In the morning we shall find out who has died in the night. ❜ ❨569❩ ❛ I was not a lovable child, and I've grown into a deeply unlovable adult. ❜ ❨570❩ ❛ The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it. ❜ ❨571❩ ❛ I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark. ❜ ❨572❩ ❛ I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don't even ripple. ❜ ❨573❩ ❛ I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way. ❜ ❨574❩ ❛ I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there - hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen. But the meanness usually wins out. ❜ ❨575❩ ❛ I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn't have loosened. A stitch come undone. ❜ ❨576❩ ❛ Everyone who keeps a secret, itches to tell it. ❜ ❨577❩ ❛ Coffee goes great with sudden death. ❜ ❨578❩ ❛ I should just listen to my gut and then do the opposite. ❜ ❨579❩ ❛ “Smile, it can't be that bad!” Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad. ❜ ❨580❩ ❛ Everything bad in the world already did happen. ❜ ❨581❩ ❛ You’re going to find peace? Like knowing is somehow going to fix you? ❜ ❨582❩ ❛ Instead of asking yourself what happened, just accept that it happened. ❜ ❨583❩ ❛ Homesick for a place I've never been. ❜ ❨584❩ ❛ Worries find you easily enough without inviting them. ❜ ❨585❩ ❛ It is always consoling to think of suicide. It's what gets one through many a bad night. ❜ ❨586❩ ❛ Do you understand this is serious? ❜ ❨587❩ ❛ Sometimes it feels good to fuck with something. Instead of always being fucked with. ❜ ❨588❩ ❛ How could you kill something you cared enough to name? ❜ ❨589❩ ❛ Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs. ❜ ❨590❩ ❛ We have the same chemicals in our blood: shame, anger, greed. Unjustified nostalgia. ❜ ❨591❩ ❛ I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. ❜ ❨592❩ ❛ The phrase fuck you may not rest on the tip of my tongue, but it’s near. Midtongue. ❜ ❨593❩ ❛ Nothing to it but to do it. ❜ ❨594❩ ❛ There are a lot of people who deserve a lesson, deserve to really understand, that nothing comes easy, that most things are going to go sour. ❜ ❨595❩ ❛ If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we’d all have a very Merry Christmas. ❜ ❨596❩ ❛ Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. ❜ ❨597❩ ❛ What does it do to a girl who knows her mother is a murderer? ❜ ❨598❩ ❛ That mean old bitch across the street bit it. ❜ ❨599❩ ❛ Survival is a talent. ❜ ❨600❩ ❛ Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. ❜ ❨601❩ ❛ Who has the courage to burn themselves? ❜ ❨602❩ ❛ Is insanity just a matter of dropping the act? ❜ ❨603❩ ❛ Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? ❜ ❨604❩ ❛ You need to be well fed, clothed, and housed to have time for this much self-pity. ❜ ❨605❩ ❛ When I am supposed to be awake, I am asleep; when I am supposed to speak, I am silent. When a pleasure offers itself to me, I avoid it. ❜ ❨606❩ ❛ There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don't feel the same. ❜ ❨607❩ ❛ In a strange way we are free. We've reached the end of the line. We have nothing more to lose. ❜ ❨608❩ ❛ The world won’t stop because we aren’t in it anymore. ❜ ❨609❩ ❛ I can't answer the real question. All I can tell you is, it's easy. ❜ ❨610❩ ❛ I am lighter, airier than I’ve been in years. ❜ ❨611❩ ❛ I am not dead, yet something in me definitely is. ❜ ❨612❩ ❛ You meant that as an insult but I am taking it as a compliment. ❜ ❨613❩ ❛ What life can recover from that? ❜ ❨614❩ ❛ It's a fairly accurate portrait of me. It's accurate but it isn't profound. ❜ ❨615❩ ❛ Pull yourself together! There's nothing wrong with you. ❜ ❨616❩ ❛ It's quiet. It's like― I don't know. It's like falling off a cliff. ❜ ❨617❩ ❛ Once you start parsing a face, it's a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots. ❜ ❨618❩ ❛ I lost him. I did it on purpose. ❜ ❨619❩ ❛ It’s a mean world. There’s nobody to take care of you out there. ❜ ❨620❩ ❛ Reality is getting too dense. ❜ ❨621❩ ❛ I'm ambivalent. In fact that's my new favourite word. ❜ ❨622❩ ❛ I can't come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions you raise. ❜ ❨623❩ ❛ A spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather. ❜ ❨624❩ ❛ Twenty-five chocolate chip cookies would be the perfect dinner. ❜ ❨625❩ ❛ A thought is a hard thing to control. ❜ ❨626❩ ❛ Life demands skills I don’t have. ❜ ❨627❩ ❛ Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful. Most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them. ❜ ❨628❩ ❛ It never stops, even at night, it’s my lullaby. ❜ ❨629❩ ❛ Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. ❜ ❨630❩ ❛ This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes. ❜ ❨631❩ ❛ I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. ❜ ❨632❩ ❛ Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. ❜ ❨633❩ ❛ Hatred is easier. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love. ❜ ❨634❩ ❛ Potential has a shelf life. ❜ ❨635❩ ❛ Don’t move. Stay like that, let me have that. ❜ ❨636❩ ❛ I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over. ❜ ❨637❩ ❛ Never pray for justice, because you might get some. ❜ ❨638❩ ❛ It disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional. ❜ ❨639❩ ❛ We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something. ❜ ❨640❩ ❛ This is what I miss, not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. ❜ ❨641❩ ❛ I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly. ❜ ❨642❩ ❛ You are amazing. Amazing and agonising and almost lethal. ❜ ❨643❩ ❛ In my dreams of this city I am always lost. ❜ ❨644❩ ❛ I don't know where these feelings have come from, I don’t know what I've done. ❜ ❨645❩ ❛ I am not the centre of your story, you are.  ❜ ❨646❩ ❛ I’m mad because you’re an asshole. ❜ ❨647❩ ❛ It's enormously pleasing to me, walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will. ❜ ❨648❩ ❛ There is never only one of anyone. ❜ ❨649❩ ❛ I can't do this without feeling I'm acting. ❜ ❨650❩ ❛ I am prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence. ❜ ❨651❩ ❛ I’m losing my appetite for strangers. ❜ ❨652❩ ❛ You wear your cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. You want it all. ❜ ❨653❩ ❛ Knowing too much about other people weakens you. You are forced to understand their reasons for doing things. ❜ ❨654❩ ❛ I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now. ❜ ❨655❩ ❛ Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it's enough to see by. ❜ ❨656❩ ❛ Whoever cares the most will lose. ❜ ❨657❩ ❛ Young women need unfairness, it’s one of their few defences.  ❜ ❨658❩ ❛ Time has gone on without you. ❜ ❨659❩ ❛ Don't let the bastards grind you down. ❜ ❨660❩ ❛ Who can remember pain, once it’s over? Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind. ❜ ❨661❩ ❛ Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse, for some. ❜ ❨662❩ ❛ There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. ❜ ❨663❩ ❛ Remember that forgiveness too is a power. ❜ ❨664❩ ❛ I am not your justification for existence. ❜ ❨665❩ ❛ I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. ❜ ❨666❩ ❛ If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. ❜ ❨667❩ ❛ All you have to do is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard. ❜ ❨668❩ ❛ Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations. ❜ ❨669❩ ❛ I want everything back, the way it was. ❜ ❨670❩ ❛ You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave. ❜ ❨671❩ ❛ Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. ❜ ❨672❩ ❛ To want is to have a weakness. ❜ ❨673❩ ❛ There isn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. ❜ ❨674❩ ❛ The past is a great darkness, filled with echoes. ❜ ❨675❩ ❛ Ordinary is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary. ❜ ❨676❩ ❛ I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilised. I wish it showed me in a better light. ❜ ❨677❩ ❛ The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. ❜ ❨678❩ ❛ By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you. ❜ ❨679❩ ❛ Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard. ❜ ❨680❩ ❛ Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. ❜ ❨681❩ ❛ Keep the others safe. Don't let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. ❜ ❨682❩ ❛ The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand. ❜ ❨683❩ ❛ The world is full of weapons if you're looking for them. ❜ ❨684❩ ❛ Nobody's heart is perfect. ❜ ❨685❩ ❛ One false move and I'm dead. ❜ ❨686❩ ❛ Watch out. I've got my eye on you. ❜ ❨687❩ ❛ Fear is a powerful stimulant. ❜ ❨688❩ ❛ I couldn't afford to lose you. ❜ ❨689❩ ❛ Name one hero who was happy. ---- You can’t. ❜ ❨690❩ ❛ I feel like I could eat the world raw. ❜ ❨691❩ ❛ We are like gods at the dawning of the world. ❜ ❨692❩ ❛ I could recognise him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world. ❜ ❨693❩ ❛ There are no bargains between lion and men. I will kill you and eat you raw. ❜ ❨694❩ ❛ You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature. ❜ ❨695❩ ❛ He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. ❜ ❨696❩ ❛ Some men gain glory after they die, others fade. ❜ ❨697❩ ❛ I am made of memories. ❜ ❨698❩ ❛ Will you come with me? ❜ ❨699❩ ❛ I wish I had let you all die. ❜ ❨700❩ ❛ It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after. ❜ ❨701❩ ❛ Bury us. Let us be free. ❜ ❨702❩ ❛ Go. He waits for you. ❜ ❨703❩ ❛ Nothing could eclipse the stain of this dirty, mortal mediocrity. ❜ ❨704❩ ❛ I know I have told you of this. ❜ ❨705❩ ❛ I don't know how you remember them all. I swear they look the same to me. ❜ ❨706❩ ❛ Perhaps you should get some new stories, so I don’t fucking kill myself of boredom. ❜ ❨707❩ ❛ I yearn for the darkness and silence of the underworld, where I can rest. ❜ ❨708❩ ❛ There is no honour in betraying your friends. ❜ ❨709❩ ❛ There is no answer. Whichever you choose, you are wrong. ❜ ❨710❩ ❛ Divine blood flows differently. ❜ ❨711❩ ❛ How is there glory in taking life? We die so easily. ❜ ❨712❩ ❛ This is what I will miss, I think. I will kill myself rather than miss it. ❜ ❨713❩ ❛ How long do we have? ❜ ❨714❩ ❛ Do you think we fight hopeless wars? ❜ ❨715❩ ❛ There is no law that gods must be fair. ❜ ❨716❩ ❛ I do not fear ridicule. I never have. ❜ ❨717❩ ❛ You were always better with words than I. ❜ ❨718❩ ❛ Who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? ❜ ❨719❩ ❛ When you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. ❜ ❨720❩ ❛ That's how the madness of the world tries to colonise you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality. ❜ ❨721❩ ❛ The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear. ❜ ❨722❩ ❛ Silence creates violence. ❜ ❨723❩ ❛ Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough. ❜ ❨724❩ ❛ There are certain kinds of connections that are so deep that when broken you feel the snap of it inside you. ❜ ❨725❩ ❛ Nothing that ever lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth. ❜ ❨726❩ ❛ We all live in a kind of continuous dream. ❜ ❨727❩ ❛ You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you. ❜ ❨728❩ ❛ What can you do when your five senses are not enough? ❜ ❨729❩ ❛ We will neither be what we had been nor what we would become once we reach our destination. ❜ ❨730❩ ❛ Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable. ❜ ❨731❩ ❛ When you are too close to the centre of a mystery there is no way to pull back. ❜ ❨732❩ ❛ I long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no. ❜ ❨733❩ ❛ I look not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I try to imagine what kind of life lives in those celestial tidal pools so far from us. ❜ ❨734❩ ❛ I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, I think. If so, it was a very small part. I ran. ❜ ❨735❩ ❛ I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. ❜ ❨736❩ ❛ All of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. ❜ ❨737❩ ❛ We don’t have real answers, because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish. ❜ ❨738❩ ❛ This part I will do alone. Don’t follow. ❜ ❨739❩ ❛ People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control. ❜ ❨740❩ ❛ Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead? ❜ ❨741❩ ❛ I loved them, but I didn’t need them, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. ❜ ❨742❩ ❛ Places can impress themselves upon me, and I can become part of them with ease. ❜ ❨743❩ ❛ There is no one with me. I am all by myself. ❜ ❨744❩ ❛ Pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic. ❜ ❨745❩ ❛ I think you're confusing suicide with self-destruction, and they're very different. Almost none of us commit suicide, whereas almost all of us self-destruct. ❜ ❨746❩ ❛ What did you eat? You had rations for only two weeks. You were there for nearly four months. ❜ ❨747❩ ❛ Something here is making giant waves in the gene pool. ❜ ❨748❩ ❛ I need to know what’s inside. ❜ ❨749❩ ❛ These aren't decisions. They're impulses ❜ ❨750❩ ❛ What do you think I do when you’re away? Do you think I’m out in the garden pinning, looking up at the sky? ❜ ❨751❩ ❛ If I know what’s happened I can save their life. ❜ ❨752❩ ❛ They either went crazy or something in here killed them. ❜ ❨753❩ ❛ Something is coming through the fence! ❜ ❨754❩ ❛ Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny. ❜ ❨755❩ ❛ People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. ❜ ❨756❩ ❛ Happy endings are still endings. ❜ ❨757❩ ❛ We believe in all sorts of things that aren't true; -- we call it history. ❜ ❨758❩ ❛ Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? ❜ ❨759❩ ❛ In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realise it is far more common for men to turn into rats. ❜ ❨760❩ ❛ Girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the side stepping of compromise.  ❜ ❨761❩ ❛ Love makes hunters of us all. ❜ ❨762❩ ❛ There is much to hate in this world and way too much to love. ❜ ❨763❩ ❛ You confuse not speaking with not listening. ❜ ❨764❩ ❛ As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention. ❜ ❨765❩ ❛ The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say. ❜ ❨766❩ ❛ Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. ❜ ❨767❩ ❛ We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. ❜ ❨768❩ ❛ The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness. ❜ ❨769❩ ❛ I know you don't want to hear this but someone has to say it! You are out of control! ❜ ❨770❩ ❛ Even at the very worst - there is always choice. ❜ ❨771❩ ❛ Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven. So you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it. ❜ ❨772❩ ❛ Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on -- or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the entire universe is changed. ❜ ❨773❩ ❛ That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness. Life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same. ❜ ❨774❩ ❛ I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without. ❜ ❨775❩ ❛ It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new. ❜ ❨776❩ ❛ Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Always the godfather, never the god. ❜ ❨777❩ ❛ The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew. ❜ ❨778❩ ❛ Evil is an act, not an appetite. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal. ❜ ❨779❩ ❛ How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table?  ❜ ❨780❩ ❛ Even God used silence as a strategy. ❜ ❨781❩ ❛ I learned failure early and mastered it. ❜ ❨782❩ ❛ It isn't whether you do it well or ill, it's that you do it all. ❜ ❨783❩ ❛ This is why you shouldn't fall in love, it blinds you. Love is a very wicked distraction. ❜ ❨784❩ ❛ Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery. ❜ ❨785❩ ❛ Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience. ❜ ❨786❩ ❛ Such brightness, as you know, decays brilliantly. ❜ ❨787❩ ❛ I take responsibility only for the future, not the past. The past can't hurt you the way the future can. ❜ ❨788❩ ❛ Tell me to mind my own business, tell me to go fuck myself, to piss off, go on, say it, but don’t tell me nothing’s wrong. ❜ ❨789❩ ❛ The truth isn't a thing of fact or reason. It is simply what everyone agrees on. ❜ ❨790❩ ❛ One can't make peace with another by force. ❜ ❨791❩ ❛ I am a forgettable leaf on a tree. ❜ ❨792❩ ❛ That's all I want; --- to do no harm. ❜ ❨793❩ ❛ I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is. ❜ ❨794❩ ❛ Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. ❜ ❨795❩ ❛ You’re too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to that we manage to endure the burden of the past. ❜ ❨796❩ ❛ Love, no matter what else it might be, is a natural talent. You are either born knowing how, or you never know. ❜ ❨797❩ ❛ Whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life. ❜ ❨798❩ ❛ There is no God worth worrying about. ❜ ❨799❩ ❛ The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love. ❜ ❨800❩ ❛ Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good. ❜ ❨801❩ ❛ Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the very end in itself. ❜ ❨802❩ ❛ Only God knows how much I love you. ❜ ❨803❩ ❛ There is no greater glory than to die for love. ❜ ❨804❩ ❛ Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies. ❜ ❨805❩ ❛ Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life. ❜ ❨806❩ ❛ Today, when I saw you, I realised that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion. ❜ ❨807❩ ❛ I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century. ❜ ❨808❩ ❛ I want to be myself again, to recover all that I was obliged to give up. ❜ ❨809❩ ❛ The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name. ❜ ❨810❩ ❛ This soup tastes like windows. ❜ ❨811❩ ❛ Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist? ❜ ❨812❩ ❛ One has to live a long time to know a man's true nature. ❜ ❨813❩ ❛ No, not rich, I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing. ❜ ❨814❩ ❛ My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse. ❜ ❨815❩ ❛ That may be the reason he does so many things, so that he will not have to think. ❜ ❨816❩ ❛ Love if it exists, is something separate: another life. ❜ ❨817❩ ❛ Things did not go as badly for me as they would for you. ❜ ❨818❩ ❛ There are things you do only for love. ❜ ❨819❩ ❛ I’ll have plenty of time to rest when I die. ❜ ❨820❩ ❛ There is no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age. ❜ ❨821❩ ❛ You treat me as if I were just anybody. ❜ ❨822❩ ❛ The symptoms of love are the same as those of cholera. ❜ ❨823❩ ❛ There is no law, human or divine, that you have not ignored. ❜ ❨824❩ ❛ Why is it that I feel I've known you so many years? ❜ ❨825❩ ❛ Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. ❜ ❨826❩ ❛ It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. ❜ ❨827❩ ❛ We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real? ❜ ❨828❩ ❛ There must be something, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing. ❜ ❨829❩ ❛ If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn. ❜ ❨830❩ ❛ If you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore. ❜ ❨831❩ ❛ You can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. ❜ ❨832❩ ❛ It was a pleasure to burn. ❜ ❨833❩ ❛ I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? ❜ ❨834❩ ❛ Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? ❜ ❨835❩ ❛ Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays? ❜ ❨836❩ ❛ Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? ❜ ❨837❩ ❛ I don't talk things. I talk the meaning of things. ❜ ❨838❩ ❛ I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning. ❜ ❨839❩ ❛ I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. ❜ ❨840❩ ❛ That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want. ❜ ❨841❩ ❛ Someday we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up. ❜ ❨842❩ ❛ You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. ❜ ❨843❩ ❛ You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. ❜ ❨844❩ ❛ When they give you lined paper, write the other way. ❜ ❨845❩ ❛ The sun burnt every day. It burnt time. ❜ ❨846❩ ❛ We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing. ❜ ❨847❩ ❛ I feel I'm doing what I should've done a lifetime ago. ❜ ❨848❩ ❛ I'm not afraid. Maybe it's because I'm doing the right thing at last. Maybe it's because I've done a rash thing and don't want to look the coward to you. ❜ ❨849❩ ❛ Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life! ❜ ❨850❩ ❛ How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you? ❜ ❨851❩ ❛ It must be right. It seems so right. ❜ ❨852❩ ❛ To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. ❜ ❨853❩ ❛ It's my game. And no one can help me. Not even you. ❜ ❨854❩ ❛ What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. ❜ ❨855❩ ❛ Death is a long process. Your body is just the first part of you that croaks. Beyond that, your dreams have to die. Then your expectations. Your anger and memories must die. Your ego. Your pride and shame and ambition and hope. ❜ ❨856❩ ❛ Help me give up my addiction to hope. ❜ ❨857❩ ❛ Life is short, death is forever. ❜ ❨858❩ ❛ Hope is something really tough and tenacious you have to give up. It’s an addiction to break. ❜ ❨859❩ ❛ If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes. ❜ ❨860❩ ❛ We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired. ❜ ❨861❩ ❛ All the demons of hell formerly reigned as gods in previous cultures. No it's not fair, but one man's god is another man's devil. ❜ ❨862❩ ❛ I can become someone else, not out of pressure and desperation, but merely because a new life sounds fun or interesting or joyful. ❜ ❨863❩ ❛ It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. ❜ ❨864❩ ❛ You fucked up. Game over. So just relax. ❜ ❨865❩ ❛ The greatest weapon any warrior can carry into battle is absolute certainty of her eternal soul. ❜ ❨866❩ ❛ If killing you will end my existence as well, be it. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living. ❜ ❨867❩ ❛ I might be a touch of a sadist and a little bit jejune but at least I'm not a victim, not any longer. I hope. ❜ ❨868❩ ❛ Dying seems like the greatest weakness, and in a world where people say you're lazy for not shaving your legs, then being dead seems like the ultimate character flaw. ❜ ❨869❩ ❛ Any concept of right versus wrong, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. ❜ ❨870❩ ❛ To prove that I exist I must kill you. ❜ ❨871❩ ❛ I'd say that my life has been a way-too-long case history of chasing rainbows. ❜ ❨872❩ ❛ The world is a battle for attention, a war to be heard. ❜ ❨873❩ ❛ Every garden looks beautiful in May. ❜ ❨874❩ ❛ When we neglect to fear such brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless. ❜ ❨875❩ ❛ My taste for power continues to grow, as does my ability to accrue it. ❜ ❨876❩ ❛ Such language! Why don't you just take a dump in my ears? ❜ ❨877❩ ❛ You’d be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. ❜ ❨878❩ ❛ Depending on her mood, she can be more frightening than any demon or devil you might ever run across. ❜ ❨879❩ ❛ Cross your fingers! Maybe death won't happen to you. ❜ ❨880❩ ❛ Do not die while wearing cheap shoes. ❜ ❨881❩ ❛ Old habits die hard. ❜ ❨882❩ ❛ It's our attachments to a fixed identity that torture us. ❜ ❨883❩ ❛ What do I think I am? In a thousand words; I don't have a clue. ❨884❩ ❛ If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me. ❜ ❨885❩ ❛ All I wanted was to be loved for myself. ❜ ❨886❩ ❛ I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer. ❜ ❨887❩ ❛ Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? ❜ ❨888❩ ❛ You have a heart that can hold the entire empire of the world. ❜ ❨889❩ ❛ Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you. ❜ ❨890❩ ❛ Tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead. ❜ ❨891❩ ❛ You are afraid of me! And yet I am not really wicked. Love me and you shall see! ❜ ❨892❩ ❛ Are people so unhappy when they love? --- Yes, when they love and are not sure of being loved. ❜ ❨893❩ ❛ Your soul is a beautiful thing. No emperor received so fair a gift. The angels wept tonight. ❜ ❨894❩ ❛ Blood!...Blood!... That's a good thing! ❜ ❨895❩ ❛ Now I want to live like everybody else. I want to have a life like everybody else. ❜ ❨896❩ ❛ You will be the happiest of women. And we will sing, all by ourselves, till we swoon away with delight. ❜ ❨897❩ ❛ I should be as gentle as a lamb; and you could do anything with me that you pleased. ❜ ❨898❩ ❛ I am going to die of love, I am dying of love. That's how it is. I loved you so. I still love you so. ❜ ❨899❩ ❛ I am dying of love for her, I tell you! If only you knew how beautiful she was when she let me kiss her. ❜ ❨900❩ ❛ He fills me with horror but I do not hate him. How can I hate him? ❜ ❨901❩ ❛ Holy angel, in Heaven blessed, my spirit longs with thee to rest. ❜ ❨902❩ ❛ Nothing is colder or more dead than my heart. ❜ ❨903❩ ❛ I had loved an angel and now I despise a woman. ❜ ❨904❩ ❛ Our lives are one masked ball. ❜ ❨905❩ ❛ Why do you condemn a man whom you have never met, whom no one knows and about whom even you yourself know nothing? ❜ ❨906❩ ❛ He would commit murder for me. ❜ ❨907❩ ❛ If I don't save her from the hands of that humbug, she is lost. But I shall save her. ❜ ❨908❩ ❛ We will go from here together or die together. ❜ ❨909❩ ❛ Your fear, your terror, all of that is just love and love of the most exquisite kind, the kind which people do not admit even to themselves. The kind that gives you a thrill, when you think of it. ❜ ❨910❩ ❛ Destiny has chained you to me forever. ❜ ❨911❩ ❛ You must never ask me that. ❜ ❨912❩ ❛ Are you afraid that you will change your mind? ❜ ❨913❩ ❛ You must come and fetch me in my dressing room at midnight exactly. ❜ ❨914❩ ❛ The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps. ❜ ❨915❩ ❛ I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts. ❜ ❨916❩ ❛ There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home. ❜ ❨917❩ ❛ I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head. ❜ ❨918❩ ❛ It’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to even mourn for it. ❜ ❨919❩ ❛ There’s nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion. ❜ ❨920❩ ❛ When did you become so weak? ❜ ❨921❩ ❛ I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it. ❜ ❨922❩ ❛ Let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers. ❜ ❨923❩ ❛ Sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them. ❜ ❨924❩ ❛ I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it. ❜ ❨925❩ ❛ I’ve just got to let myself feel the pain, because if I don’t, if I keep numbing it, it’ll never really go away. ❜ ❨926❩ ❛ I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way. It’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move. ❜ ❨927❩ ❛ Who was it that said following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all. ❜ ❨928❩ ❛ It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. ❜ ❨929❩ ❛ Sometimes I catch myself trying to remember the last time I had meaningful physical contact with another person, just a hug or a heartfelt squeeze of my hand, and my heart twitches. ❜ ❨930❩ ❛ I have to find a way of making myself happy, I have to stop looking for happiness elsewhere. ❜ ❨931❩ ❛ How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn? ❜ ❨932❩ ❛ Now look -- Now look what you made me do. ❜ ❨933❩ ❛ It’s okay, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness. ❜ ❨934❩ ❛ They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be. ❜ ❨935❩ ❛ You broke me and I broke us. ❜ ❨936❩ ❛ I’ve been the fool. If he does it with you, he’ll do it to you. ❜ ❨937❩ ❛ I’d never realised, not until now, how shameful it is to be pitied. ❜ ❨938❩ ❛ Sometimes, I don’t want to go anywhere, I think I’ll be happy if I never have to set foot outside the house again. ❜ ❨939❩ ❛ I don’t believe in soul mates, but there’s an understanding between us that I just haven’t felt before, or at least, not for a long time. ❜ ❨940❩ ❛ There can be no greater agony, nothing can be more painful than the not knowing, which will never end. ❜ ❨941❩ ❛ Being the other woman is a huge turn-on, there’s no point in denying it: you’re the one he can’t help but betray his wife for, even though he loves her. That’s just how irresistible you are. ❜ ❨942❩ ❛ I feel a rush of gratitude so strong, it feels almost like love. ❜ ❨943❩ ❛ You don’t know how determined I can be. Once I’ve made my mind up, I’m a force to be reckoned with. ❜ ❨944❩ ❛ The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be. ❜ ❨945❩ ❛ You don’t have to be afraid of being alone. It’s not the worst thing, is it? ❜ ❨946❩ ❛ I have felt this way before. On a larger scale, to a more intense degree, of course, but I remember the quality of the pain. You don’t forget it. ❜ ❨947❩ ❛ If he thinks I’m going to sit around crying, he’s got another thing coming. ❜ ❨948❩ ❛ I don’t like to lose. It’s not like me. None of this is like me. I don’t get rejected. I’m the one who walks away. ❜ ❨949❩ ❛ I don’t remember anger, raging fury. I remember fear. ❜ ❨950❩ ❛ I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in days. I hate it, hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain going round, tick, tick, tick, tick. ❜ ❨951❩ ❛ Maybe the courage I need has nothing to do with telling the truth and everything to do with walking away. ❜ ❨952❩ ❛ I’m not beautiful, and I can’t have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless. ❜ ❨953❩ ❛ Failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under and I gave up hope. ❜ ❨954❩ ❛ It’s an odd thing to say, but I think this all the time; I don’t feel bad enough. ❜ ❨955❩ ❛ Some battles aren’t worth fighting. ❜ ❨956❩ ❛ I never felt guilty. I pretended I did. I had to. ❜ ❨957❩ ❛ I never meant for any of this to happen, we fell in love, what could we do? ❜ ❨958❩ ❛ What bothers me most is that I haven’t got to the end of my story, and I can’t start over with someone else, it’s too hard. ❜ ❨959❩ ❛ A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended. ❜ ❨960❩ ❛ It isn’t only wickedness and scheming that make people unhappy, it is confusion and misunderstanding. ❜ ❨961❩ ❛ Falling in love can be achieved in a single word—a glance. ❜ ❨962❩ ❛ Though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you. ❜ ❨963❩ ❛ I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. ❜ ❨964❩ ❛ It might hurt, it is horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but it is what it is to be in love. ❜ ❨965❩ ❛ It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. ❜ ❨966❩ ❛ Come back, come back to me. ❜ ❨967❩ ❛ In my thoughts I make love to you all day long. ❜ ❨968❩ ❛ The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence and I don’t think I can blame the heat. ❜ ❨969❩ ❛ Beauty occupies a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, has infinite variation. ❜ ❨970❩ ❛ Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy? ❜ ❨971❩ ❛ However, withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I’ve always been. ❜ ❨972❩ ❛ Hate is a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational. ❜ ❨973❩ ❛ I’m going mad. Let me not be mad. ❜ ❨974❩ ❛ Is everyone really as alive as I am? ❜ ❨975❩ ❛ Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone teaches you something about yourself. ❜ ❨976❩ ❛ Something has happened, hasn’t it? ❜ ❨977❩ ❛ I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness. ❜ ❨978❩ ❛ Is it possible that I am, in the modern term, in denial? ❜ ❨979❩ ❛ How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect? ❜ ❨980❩ ❛ Not everything has a cause. Some things are simply so. ❜ ❨981❩ ❛ I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m torn between breaking your neck here and throwing you down the stairs. ❜ ❨982❩ ❛ How old do you have to be before you know the difference between right and wrong? ❜ ❨983❩ ❛ It was never meant to be read. ❜ ❨984❩ ❛ If I fell in the river, would you save me? ❜ ❨985❩ ❛ That was an incredibly bloody stupid thing to do. ❜ ❨986❩ ❛ I want to thank you for saving my life. I’ll be eternally grateful to you. ❜ ❨987❩ ❛ I’m very, very sorry for the terrible distress that I have caused. I’m very, very sorry. ❜ ❨988❩ ❛ Don’t call me that! – Please don’t call me that. ❜ ❨989❩ ❛ It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it’s mine. ❜ ❨990❩ ❛ Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer. ❜ ❨991❩ ❛ No one ever really gets used to nightmares. ❜ ❨992❩ ❛ I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I’m not. ❜ ❨993❩ ❛ Sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila. ❜ ❨994❩ ❛ Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it. ❜ ❨995❩ ❛ Beautiful women are always drawn to men they think will keep them beautiful. ❜ ❨996❩ ❛ The ruminations are mine, let the world be yours. ❜ ❨997❩ ❛ You will fulfil a promise I made years ago but failed to keep. ❜ ❨998❩ ❛ Darkness never satisfies. Especially if it takes something away which it almost always invariably does. ❜ ❨999❩ ❛ I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore. ❜ ❨1000❩ ❛ What can I say, I’m a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff. ❜ ❨1001❩ ❛ Is it possible to love something so much, you imagine it wants to destroy you only because it has denied you? ❜ ❨1002❩ ❛ It’s just silent, no sound at all. It’s like something’s waiting. ❜ ❨1003❩ ❛ I guess I’m hoping the weapons will make me feel better, grant me some kind of fucking control. ❜ ❨1004❩ ❛ Oh and something else: – Fuck you. ❜ ❨1005❩ ❛ God I’ve never been afraid like this. ❜ ❨1006❩ ❛ I miss you. I love you. There’s no second I’ve lived that you can’t call your own. ❜ ❨1007❩ ❛ I’m so tired. Sleep’s been stalking me for too long to remember. Inevitable I suppose. ❜ ❨1008❩ ❛ Not seeing the rip doesn’t mean you automatically get to keep clear of the Hey-I’m-Bleeding part. ❜ ❨1009❩ ❛ These days fantasies flourish and die like summer flies. ❜ ❨1010❩ ❛ Yeah I know, I know. This shit’s getting ridiculous. ❜ ❨1011❩ ❛ ‘Fuck’ and 'fall for’ have very different meanings. The first one you do as much as you can. The second one you never ever, ever do. ❜ ❨1012❩ ❛ It’s a nice idea but it reeks of hope. False hope. ❜ ❨1013❩ ❛ It’s, well…one thing in two words: fucked up…very fucked up. Okay three words, four words, who the hell cares…very very fucked up. ❜ ❨1014❩ ❛ Do you think I could spend the night at your place?  ❜ ❨1015❩ ❛ Any fool can pray. ❜ ❨1016❩ ❛ I feel like I haven’t slept in months. My neighbours are scared of me. ❜ ❨1017❩ ❛ I’ve lost my mind? Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe I’m just really drunk. ❜ ❨1018❩ ❛ Perhaps by cleaning out my system I’ll come to a clearing where I can ease myself into peace. ❜ ❨1019❩ ❛ I should be dead. Why am I still here? ❜ ❨1020❩ ❛ Fuck if I know. Your guess is as good as mine. ❜ ❨1021❩ ❛ You are my flesh. You are my bones. I know you too well. I read you too perfectly. ❜ ❨1022❩ ❛ Not all complex problems have easy solutions. ❜ ❨1023❩ ❛ Do you believe in God? I don’t think I ever asked you that one. ❜ ❨1024❩ ❛ We all create stories to protect ourselves. ❜ ❨1025❩ ❛ Are you kidding me? This place is scary. ❜ ❨1026❩ ❛ These days the only thing that gets me outside is when I say: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. ❜ ❨1027❩ ❛ You like that crap because it reminds you of you. ❜ ❨1028❩ ❛ You may suddenly realise things are not how you perceived them to be at all. ❜ ❨1029❩ ❛ The two hardest tests are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter. ❜ ❨1030❩ ❛ People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves. ❜ ❨1031❩ ❛ Be crazy! But learn how to be crazy without being the center of attention. Be brave enough to live different. ❜ ❨1032❩ ❛ You are someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that in my view is a serious illness. ❜ ❨1033❩ ❛ God chose you to be different. ❜ ❨1034❩ ❛ Why are you disappointing God with this kind of attitude? ❜ ❨1035❩ ❛ You have two choices, to control your mind or to let your mind control you. ❜ ❨1036❩ ❛ Everyone is indeed crazy, but the craziest are the ones who don't know they're crazy; they just keep repeating what others tell them to. ❜ ❨1037❩ ❛ Haven't you learned anything, not even with the approach of death?  ❜ ❨1038❩ ❛ If people don't like it, they can complain. And if they don't have the courage to complain, that's their problem. ❜ ❨1039❩ ❛ Nothing in this world happens by chance. ❜ ❨1040❩ ❛ I want to continue living my life the way I dream it, and not the way the other people want it to be. ❜ ❨1041❩ ❛ Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains. ❜ ❨1042❩ ❛ Collective madness is called sanity. ❜ ❨1043❩ ❛ Consider each day a miracle - which indeed it is, when you consider the number of unexpected things that could happen in each second of our fragile existences. ❜ ❨1044❩ ❛ You say they create their own reality, but what is reality? ❜ ❨1045❩ ❛ Many people don't allow themselves to love because there are a lot of things at risk. A lot of future and a lot of past. ❜ ❨1046❩ ❛ Death frees from the fear of dying. ❜ ❨1047❩ ❛ The danger of an adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort. ❜ ❨1048❩ ❛ The happier people can be, the unhappier they are. ❜ ❨1049❩ ❛ Life is always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act. ❜ ❨1050❩ ❛ It's best to accept life as it really is and not as you imagined it to be. ❜ ❨1051❩ ❛ You don't seem mad at all. ❜ ❨1052❩ ❛ We’re allowed to make a lot of mistakes in our lives, except the mistake that destroys us. ❜ ❨1053❩ ❛ You’re what you are, not what others make of you. ❜ ❨1054❩ ❛ Am I cured? ❜ ❨1055❩ ❛ Real love changes and grows with time and discovers new ways of expressing itself. ❜ ❨1056❩ ❛ A lot of people think something is right, and so that thing becomes right. Is that it? ❜ ❨1057❩ ❛ They think they're normal, because they all do the same thing. ❜ ❨1058❩ ❛ I didn't know that other ‘me’s existed inside me, ‘Me’s that I could love. ❜ ❨1059❩ ❛ I have no idea what's awaiting me. ❜ ❨1060❩ ❛ What will happen when this all ends? ❜ ❨1061❩ ❛ I know that you are capable of great deeds. ❜ ❨1062❩ ❛ A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart. ❜ ❨1063❩ ❛ The truth is that everyone is bored. ❜ ❨1064❩ ❛ I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. ❜ ❨1065❩ ❛ If there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love. ❜ ❨1066❩ ❛ Who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for even a single moment's suffering? ❜ ❨1067❩ ❛ It's not easy. I've been thinking it over for years. ❜ ❨1068❩ ❛ While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. ❜ ❨1069❩ ❛ People are more often bad than good. ❜ ❨1070❩ ❛ I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learned that it can be murderous. ❜ ❨1071❩ ❛ What interests me is living and dying for what one loves. ❜ ❨1072❩ ❛ In fact, nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. ❜ ❨1073❩ ❛ Nothing in the world is worth turning one's back on what one loves. ❜ ❨1074❩ ❛ Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ❜ ❨1075❩ ❛ There are more things to admire in men then to despise. ❜ ❨1076❩ ❛ It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence. ❜ ❨1077❩ ❛ What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this? ❜ ❨1078❩ ❛ Your code of morals? What code, if I may ask? ❜ ❨1079❩ ❛ I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding anything. ❜ ❨1080❩ ❛ No doubt our love is still there, but quite simply it is unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. ❜ ❨1081❩ ❛ I’m not happy to go, but one needn't be happy to make another start. ❜ ❨1082❩ ❛ I am incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that I am incapable of anything really worth while. ❜ ❨1083❩ ❛ I should have found the words to keep her with me. ❜ ❨1084❩ ❛ We can't stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody. ❜ ❨1085❩ ❛ The evil that is in the world comes out of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. ❜ ❨1086❩ ❛ There are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live. ❜ ❨1087❩ ❛ The best protection against anything is a good bottle of wine. ❜ ❨1088❩ ❛ There is no peace without hope. ❜ ❨1089❩ ❛ It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment. ❜ ❨1090❩ ❛ There is always something left to love. ❜ ❨1091❩ ❛ A person doesn’t die when he should but when he can. ❜ ❨1092❩ ❛ Things have a life of their own. It's simply a matter of waking up their souls. ❜ ❨1093❩ ❛ Tell me something: why are you fighting? ❜ ❨1094❩ ❛ I've come to realise only just now that I'm fighting because of pride. ❜ ❨1095❩ ❛ One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship. ❜ ❨1096❩ ❛ It's better than not knowing why you're fighting. Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn't have any meaning for anyone. ❜ ❨1097❩ ❛ Holy Mother of God! ❜ ❨1098❩ ❛ A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground. ❜ ❨1099❩ ❛ I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch. ❜ ❨1100❩ ❛ Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it. ❜ ❨1101❩ ❛ I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance. ❜ ❨1102❩ ❛ Get those bad thoughts out of your head. You're going to be happy. ❜ ❨1103❩ ❛ Children inherit their parents' madness. ❜ ❨1104❩ ❛ I'll turn to ashes in here but I won't give this miserable town the pleasure of seeing me weep. ❜ ❨1105❩ ❛ You would be good in a war. Where you put your eye, you put your bullet. ❜ ❨1106❩ ❛ Men demand much more than you think. ❜ ❨1107❩ ❛ Even the craziest and most persistent love is just a temporary truth. ❜ ❨1108❩ ❛ If we’re alone you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of. ❜ ❨1109❩ ❛ You have taken this horrible game very seriously and you have done well because you are doing your duty. ❜ ❨1110❩ ❛ We have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect. ❜ ❨1111❩ ❛ What worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death. ❜ ❨1112❩ ❛ What worries me is that you've ended up as bad as they are. ❜ ❨1113❩ ❛ It is characteristic of men to deny hunger once their appetites are satisfied. ❜ ❨1114❩ ❛ Dying is much more difficult than one imagines. ❜ ❨1115❩ ❛ If you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourself! ❜ ❨1116❩ ❛ We have still not had a death. ❜ ❨1117❩ ❛ How awful, the way time passes. ❜ ❨1118❩ ❛ You may be in command of your war, but I'm in command of my house. ❜ ❨1119❩ ❛ I missed you every hour. ❜ ❨1120❩ ❛ You know what the worst part was? It caught me completely by surprise. ❜ ❨1121❩ ❛ I’ve risked my life for you. ❜ ❨1122❩ ❛ The problem with wanting is that it makes us weak. ❜ ❨1123❩ ❛ I love you, even the part of you that loved him. ❜ ❨1124❩ ❛ I’m sorry it took me so long to see you. ❜ ❨1125❩ ❛ I never really belonged anywhere. ❜ ❨1126❩ ❛ Thanks for being my best friend and making my life bearable.  ❜ ❨1127❩ ❛ Thanks for finding me. ❜ ❨1128❩ ❛ You and I are going to change the world. ❜ ❨1129❩ ❛ I’ve been waiting for you a long time. ❜ ❨1130❩ ❛ I’m not used to people trying to kill me. ❜ ❨1131❩ ❛ You’re shaking. ❜ ❨1132❩ ❛ There's nothing wrong with being a lizard. Unless you were born to be a hawk. ❜ ❨1133❩ ❛ Make me your villain. ❜ ❨1134❩ ❛ Just you and me. It’s always just you and me. ❜ ❨1135❩ ❛ Do you blame me for every mistake I made? For every dumb thing I’ve said? ❜ ❨1136❩ ❛ Well, if it gets too bad, give me a signal. ❜ ❨1137❩ ❛ Did you tell him what I showed you in the dark? ❜ ❨1138❩ ❛ Did you miss me when you were gone? ❜ ❨1139❩ ❛ What is infinite? The universe and the greed of men. ❜ ❨1140❩ ❛ You’re interfering with my plan. ❜ ❨1141❩ ❛ Too much champagne? ❜ ❨1142❩ ❛ I hope you don’t expect fairness from me. It isn’t one of my specialties. ❜ ❨1143❩ ❛ There is something more powerful than any army. Something strong enough to topple kings. Faith. ❜ ❨1144❩ ❛ All you said was that I had to kill you. You didn’t say how. ❜ ❨1145❩ ❛ What is she? She’s everything, you dumb son of a bitch. ❜ ❨1146❩ ❛ She’s an ugly little thing. No child should look like that. Pale and sour, like a glass of milk that’s turned. ❜ ❨1147❩ ❛ I wouldn’t make that mistake again. ❜ ❨1148❩ ❛ It’s a great honor, to save a life. You saved many. ❜ ❨1149❩ ❛ In this world, there are things you can only do alone. ❜ ❨1150❩ ❛ What seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else. ❜ ❨1151❩ ❛ If you really want to know something, you have to be willing to pay the price. ❜ ❨1152❩ ❛ Why should you be interested in me? ❜ ❨1153❩ ❛ I have been told I've got a darkish personality. A few times. ❜ ❨1154❩ ❛ It's not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There's shadowy middle ground. ❜ ❨1155❩ ❛ I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel. ❜ ❨1156❩ ❛ The spotlight doesn't suit me. I'm more of a side dish. ❜ ❨1157❩ ❛ The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you.  ❜ ❨1158❩ ❛ So once you're dead there's just nothing? ❜ ❨1159❩ ❛ If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality. ❜ ❨1160❩ ❛ Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action? ❜ ❨1161❩ ❛ Nobody can shake off their own shadow. ❜ ❨1162❩ ❛ The silence is so deep it hurts. ❜ ❨1163❩ ❛ I may not look it, but I can be a very patient guy. ❜ ❨1164❩ ❛ Killing time is one of my specialities. ❜ ❨1165❩ ❛ You can't fight it. ❜ ❨1166❩ ❛ Tell me something,—do you believe in reincarnation? ❜ ❨1167❩ ❛ I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it. ❜ ❨1168❩ ❛ I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner.  ❜ ❨1169❩ ❛ I do have a few things wrong with me, but those are strictly problems I keep inside. ❜ ❨1170❩ ❛ I can't take it any more, I can't go on any more. ❜ ❨1171❩ ❛ You don't really have it together. ❜ ❨1172❩ ❛ Is it against the law for me to know it? ❜ ❨1173❩ ❛ I keep having the same dream. ❜ ❨1174❩ ❛ Are you asking because you really want an answer? ❜ ❨1175❩ ❛ I hate this! I don't want to be changed this way! ❜ ❨1176❩ ❛ No contradictions, no irony. They do everything according to numerical formulas. ❜ ❨1177❩ ❛ Want to hear the rest? If you’re not interested, I can stop. ❜ ❨1178❩ ❛ If I didn’t have these memories inside me, I would’ve snapped a long time ago. I would’ve curled up in a ditch somewhere and died. ❜ ❨1179❩ ❛ I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend. ❜ ❨1180❩ ❛ What are you doing here, honey? ❜ ❨1181❩ ❛ You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets. ❜ ❨1182❩ ❛ You don't understand me. ❜ ❨1183❩ ❛ All wisdom ends in paradox. ❜ ❨1184❩ ❛ It is love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. ❜ ❨1185❩ ❛ I have lost my gift. ❜ ❨1186❩ ❛ Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair. ❜ ❨1187❩ ❛ The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us. ❜ ❨1188❩ ❛ They're just memories now. It’s time to forget. ❜ ❨1189❩ ❛ The time has to be right and the heart willing. ❜ ❨1190❩ ❛ The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season. ❜ ❨1191❩ ❛ Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy. ❜ ❨1192❩ ❛ Grief is natural, overcoming it is a matter of choice. ❜ ❨1193❩ ❛ I want out of that decorating scheme. ❜ ❨1194❩ ❛ With most people suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. ❜ ❨1195❩ ❛ You never get over it but you get where it doesn't bother you so much. ❜ ❨1196❩ ❛ Don't waste your time on life. ❜ ❨1197❩ ❛ I'm a teenager. I've got problems! ❜ ❨1198❩ ❛ Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it. ❜ ❨1199❩ ❛ Obviously, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl. ❜ ❨1200❩ ❛ It was a mistake. ❜ ❨1201❩ ❛ It seemed like we were supposed to feel sorry for everything that ever happened, ever. ❜ ❨1202❩ ❛ Buffeted but not broken. ❜ ❨1203❩ ❛ Shit. What have kids got to be worried about now? ❜ ❨1204❩ ❛ If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh. ❜ ❨1205❩ ❛ I can't wait until I get out of here. ❜ ❨1206❩ ❛ When she jumped she probably thought she’d fly. ❜ ❨1207❩ ❛ I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help. ❜ ❨1208❩ ❛ You're a stone fox. ❜ ❨1209❩ ❛ It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight. ❜ ❨1210❩ ❛ Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. ❜ ❨1211❩ ❛ He broke my heart. You merely broke my life. ❜ ❨1212❩ ❛ I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is. ❜ ❨1213❩ ❛ Words without experience are meaningless. ❜ ❨1214❩ ❛ I loved you. I was a monster, but I loved you. ❜ ❨1215❩ ❛ Come just as you are. ❜ ❨1216❩ ❛ If a violin string could ache, i would be that string. ❜ ❨1217❩ ❛ Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again. ❜ ❨1218❩ ❛ What's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own. ❜ ❨1219❩ ❛ Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me. ❜ ❨1220❩ ❛ You took advantage of my disadvantage. ❜ ❨1221❩ ❛ I walk in a maze I cannot get out of. ❜ ❨1222❩ ❛ Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses. ❜ ❨1223❩ ❛ Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me. ❜ ❨1224❩ ❛ There is no harm in smiling. ❜ ❨1225❩ ❛ There is no point in staying here. There is no point in staying anywhere. ❜ ❨1226❩ ❛ There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. ❜ ❨1227❩ ❛ I am so tired of being cynical. ❜ ❨1228❩ ❛ Come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me. ❜ ❨1229❩ ❛ This is the only immortality that you and I may share. ❜ ❨1230❩ ❛ I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. ❜ ❨1231❩ ❛ I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! ❜ ❨1232❩ ❛ Years of secret suffering has taught me superhuman self-control. ❜ ❨1233❩ ❛ Solitude is corrupting me. I need company and care. ❜ ❨1234❩ ❛ I've missed you terribly. ❜ ❨1235❩ ❛ I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you. ❜ ❨1236❩ ❛ It doesn't matter a bit, because you've stopped caring anyway. ❜ ❨1237❩ ❛ What makes you say I've stopped caring for you? ❜ ❨1238❩ ❛ Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. ❜ ❨1239❩ ❛ The sun climbs high in the sky, then starts down. People come, then go. ❜ ❨1240❩ ❛ Tell me, have you ever thought of killing me? ❜ ❨1241❩ ❛ I can not believe you are the same human being. ❜ ❨1242❩ ❛ Just how urgent is it? ❜ ❨1243❩ ❛ It is time for you to be going. ❜ ❨1244❩ ❛ How is it you know something like that? ❜ ❨1245❩ ❛ I don’t mind. Your mess is my mess. ❜ ❨1246❩ ❛ Everybody has one thing they do not want to lose. ❜ ❨1247❩ ❛ I’ll be late tonight, so don’t wait up for me. ❜ ❨1248❩ ❛ Nothing I’ve tried to do by myself has ever come off. ❜ ❨1249❩ ❛ I am not catching you in the middle of anything important, am I? ❜ ❨1250❩ ❛ Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. ❜ ❨1251❩ ❛ My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. ❜ ❨1252❩ ❛ To get irritated is to lose our way in life. ❜ ❨1253❩ ❛ A friend to kill time is a friend sublime. ❜ ❨1254❩ ❛ I don't really know if it's the right thing to do. ❜ ❨1255❩ ❛ Faster cars and more cats run over? Who needs it? ❜ ❨1256❩ ❛ Most of everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories. ❜ ❨1257❩ ❛ Your fate is and will always be the fate of a dreamer. ❜ ❨1258❩ ❛ You’re loads better than you think you are. ❜ ❨1259❩ ❛ You’re only half-living, the other half is still untapped somewhere. ❜ ❨1260❩ ❛ The song is over. But the melody lingers on. ❜ ❨1261❩ ❛ You are extraordinary. ❜ ❨1262❩ ❛ We tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on. ❜ ❨1263❩ ❛ It could be five years or ten years or one month. It's all the same. ❜ ❨1264❩ ❛ I’m forever realising things too late. ❜ ❨1265❩ ❛ I’m not complaining when I say my life is boring. ❜ ❨1266❩ ❛ Weakness is something that rots in the body. ❜ ❨1267❩ ❛ Coming from your mouth, it has the ring of truth, but I doubt anyone would believe me if I told them. ❜ ❨1268❩ ❛ You can't expect something unreal to last anyway, can you? ❜ ❨1269❩ ❛ A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat. ❜ ❨1270❩ ❛ So, kill me. Tell the others I attacked you so you killed me. ❜ ❨1271❩ ❛ Should never have come here. ❜ ❨1272❩ ❛ Hard to guess my tastes. ❜ ❨1273❩ ❛ Can’t it wait until the morning? ❜ ❨1274❩ ❛ You’ll find temper tantrums won’t help you here. ❜ ❨1275❩ ❛ It must have taken courage to return. ❜ ❨1276❩ ❛ It all sounds grimly dystopian. ❜ ❨1277❩ ❛ I am not afraid of you! ❜ ❨1278❩ ❛ All this could be avoided! ❜ ❨1279❩ ❛ You consider me a murderer? ❜ ❨1280❩ ❛ Gross way to die. ❜ ❨1281❩ ❛ What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. ❜ ❨1282❩ ❛ My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops? ❜ ❨1283❩ ❛ Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others. ❜ ❨1284❩ ❛ I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there. ❜ ❨1285❩ ❛ You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human. ❜ ❨1286❩ ❛ Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible. ❜ ❨1287❩ ❛ Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty. ❜ ❨1288❩ ❛ Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths. ❜ ❨1289❩ ❛ Dreams are all I have ever truly owned. ❜ ❨1290❩ ❛ Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters. ❜ ❨1291❩ ❛ I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. ❜ ❨1292❩ ❛ By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. ❜ ❨1293❩ ❛ The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken. ❜ ❨1294❩ ❛ Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right. ❜ ❨1295❩ ❛ The weak are meat the strong do eat. ❜ ❨1296❩ ❛ Do whatever you can't not do. ❜ ❨1297❩ ❛ What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. ❜ ❨1298❩ ❛ I remain thankful to God for all his mercies. ❜ ❨1299❩ ❛ You can maintain power over people, as long as you give them something. Rob a man of everything, and that man will no longer be in your power. ❜ ❨1300❩ ❛ Power. The ability to determine another man's luck. ❜ ❨1301❩ ❛ Pain is strong, aye - but friends' eyes, more strong. ❜ ❨1302❩ ❛ Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively. ❜ ❨1303❩ ❛ Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions? ❜ ❨1304❩ ❛ You can’t lie to your soul. ❜ ❨1305❩ ❛ Why would I want to do a thing like that? ❜ ❨1306❩ ❛ We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. ❜ ❨1307❩ ❛ Better to make life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be. ❜ ❨1308❩ ❛ I’m not running away, I’m moving on. ❜ ❨1309❩ ❛ The reasons? There are no reasons. ❜ ❨1310❩ ❛ Some people are easier to love when you don’t have to be around them. ❜ ❨1311❩ ❛ Love does not exist. ❜ ❨1312❩ ❛ Fuck that ‘regrets’ bullshit. ❜ ❨1313❩ ❛ How does it make you feel? ❜ ❨1314❩ ❛ It’s horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone. ❜ ❨1315❩ ❛ Choose us. Choose life. ❜ ❨1316❩ ❛ You fucking knew that fucking cunt would fuck some cunt. ❜ ❨1317❩ ❛ I’m more of a warrior than you’ll ever be. ❜ ❨1318❩ ❛ What does that make us? The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. ❜ ❨1319❩ ❛ You don’t have to run away.  ❜ ❨1320❩ ❛ I tried to stop because it was only causing pain. I couldn’t. ❜ ❨1321❩ ❛ I’m not going to get crushed. ❜ ❨1322❩ ❛ I love doubt in a woman. It’s nearly as sexy as determination. ❜ ❨1323❩ ❛ Take your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty. ❜ ❨1324❩ ❛ You’re a mess. ❜ ❨1325❩ ❛ I know that it’s never left you alone. ❜ ❨1326❩ ❛ Are you asking me or telling me? ❜ ❨1327❩ ❛ You just get used to all the shit. ❜ ❨1328❩ ❛ You can’t afford a conscience in this life. ❜ ❨1329❩ ❛ None of us are saints and scapegoats are always handy. ❜ ❨1330❩ ❛ Doing things doesn’t hurt you; you get hurt by avoiding them. ❜ ❨1331❩ ❛ What was that? ❜ ❨1332❩ ❛ Protect me from those who wish to help us. ❜ ❨1333❩ ❛ You can’t love yourself if you want to hurt things like that. ❜ ❨1334❩ ❛ What happens when people open their hearts? ❜ ❨1335❩ ❛ Nobody likes being alone that much. ❜ ❨1336❩ ❛ I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.” ❨1337❩ ❛ Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that. ❜ ❨1338❩ ❛ You need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. ❜ ❨1339❩ ❛ I want you always to remember me. ❜ ❨1340❩ ❛ Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt. ❜ ❨1341❩ ❛ What stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish. ❜ ❨1342❩ ❛ All I want in this world is you. ❜ ❨1343❩ ❛ I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning. ❜ ❨1344❩ ❛ No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. ❜ ❨1345❩ ❛ What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously. ❜ ❨1346❩ ❛ If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark. ❜ ❨1347❩ ❛ I’ve had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy. ❜ ❨1348❩ ❛ People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die. ❜ ❨1349❩ ❛ Stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they’re supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. ❜ ❨1350❩ ❛ When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you’re in big trouble. ❜ ❨1351❩ ❛ When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it. ❜ ❨1352❩ ❛ If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well. ❜ ❨1353❩ ❛ Hey, what is it with you? Why are you so spaced out? You still haven’t answered me. ❜ ❨1354❩ ❛ People are strange when you’re a stranger. ❜ ❨1355❩ ❛ The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living. ❜ ❨1356❩ ❛ You don’t get it, do you? ❜ ❨1357❩ ❛ I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed human being than you ❨1358❩ realise. ❜ ❨1359❩ ❛ At least let me know whether or not I hurt you. ❜ ❨1360❩ ❛ All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. ❜ ❨1361❩ ❛ I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die. ❜ ❨1362❩ ❛ So I’m not crazy after all! ❜ ❨1363❩ ❛ I miss you terribly sometimes, but in general I go on living with all the energy I can muster. ❜ ❨1364❩ ❛ Will you wait for me forever? ❜ ❨1365❩ ❛ I don’t want our relationship to end like this. ❜ ❨1366❩ ❛ When am I going to be able to talk to you? I want you to tell me that much, at least. ❜ ❨1367❩ ❛ It hurts not being able to see you. ❜ ❨1368❩ ❛ I’m not totally mad at you. I’m just sad. ❜ ❨1369❩ ❛ The world is an inherently unfair place. ❜ ❨1370❩ ❛ Life frightens me sometimes. I don’t happen to take that as the premise for everything else though. ❜ ❨1371❩ ❛ I’m a real bargain, don’t you think? If you don’t take me, I’ll end up going somewhere else. ❜ ❨1372❩ ❛ We’re all kind of weird and twisted and drowning. ❜ ❨1373❩ ❛ Don’t you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don’t know a soul? ❜ ❨1374❩ ❛ You’re not telling me anything I don’t know already. ❜ ❨1375❩ ❛ He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. ❜ ❨1376❩ ❛ If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. ❜ ❨1377❩ ❛ We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness. ❜ ❨1378❩ ❛ Until they become conscious they will never rebel. ❜ ❨1379❩ ❛ Power is not a means; it is an end. ❜ ❨1380❩ ❛ They are not interested in the good of others; they are interested solely in power, pure power. ❜ ❨1381❩ ❛ Now you begin to understand me. ❜ ❨1382❩ ❛ In the face of pain there are no heroes. ❜ ❨1383❩ ❛ Big Brother is watching you. ❜ ❨1384❩ ❛ Power is tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. ❜ ❨1385❩ ❛ It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. ❜ ❨1386❩ ❛ The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. ❜ ❨1387❩ ❛ Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind. ❜ ❨1388❩ ❛ Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. ❜ ❨1389❩ ❛ We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them. ❜ ❨1390❩ ❛ How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? ❜ ❨1391❩ ❛ You must try harder. ❜ ❨1392❩ ❛ Confession is not betrayal. ❜ ❨1393❩ ❛ What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. ❜ ❨1394❩ ❛ If they could make me stop loving you —- that would be the real betrayal. ❜ ❨1395❩ ❛ Of pain you can wish only one thing: that it should stop. ❜ ❨1396❩ ❛ To die hating them, that will be freedom. ❜ ❨1397❩ ❛ No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. ❜ ❨1398❩ ❛ What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself? ❜ ❨1399❩ ❛ To keep them in control is not difficult. ❜ ❨1400❩ ❛ So long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. ❜ ❨1401❩ ❛ The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. ❜ ❨1402❩ ❛ The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. ❜ ❨1403❩ ❛ Stupidity is as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain. ❜ ❨1404❩ ❛ I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones. ❜ ❨1405❩ ❛ The past is dead, the future is unimaginable. ❜ ❨1406❩ ❛ You know the answer already. Everyone knows it. ❜ ❨1407❩ ❛ You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself. ❜ ❨1408❩ ❛ It is not easy to become sane. ❜ ❨1409❩ ❛ No emotion is pure anymore, because everything is mixed up with fear and hatred. ❜ ❨1410❩ ❛ They say that time heals all things —- they say you can always forget. ❜ ❨1411❩ ❛ The object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. ❜ ❨1412❩ ❛ I sold you and you sold me. ❜ ❨1413❩ ❛ You do not exist. ❜ ❨1414❩ ❛ How does one man assert his power over another? By making him suffer. ❜ ❨1415❩ ❛ Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? ❜ ❨1416❩ ❛ Everything else we shall destroy – everything. ❜ ❨1417❩ ❛ Two and two makes five. ❜ ❨1418❩ ❛ Facts, at any rate, can not be kept hidden. ❜ ❨1419❩ ❛ The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. ❜ ❨1420❩ ❛ So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing. ❜ ❨1421❩ ❛ If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then? ❜ ❨1422❩ ❛ The lie became the truth. ❜ ❨1423❩ ❛ It is like swimming against a current that sweeps you backwards however hard you struggle. ❜ ❨1424❩ ❛ Turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. ❜ ❨1425❩ ❛ It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything. ❜ ❨1426❩ ❛ I don’t want to die without any scars. ❜ ❨1427❩ ❛ This is your life and it’s ending one moment at a time. ❜ ❨1428❩ ❛ You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways. ❜ ❨1429❩ ❛ You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. ❜ ❨1430❩ ❛ You are not special. ❜ ❨1431❩ ❛ You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. ❜ ❨1432❩ ❛ The things you used to own, now they own you. ❜ ❨1433❩ ❛ Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you. ❜ ❨1434❩ ❛ Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves. ❜ ❨1435❩ ❛ Only after disaster can we be resurrected. ❜ ❨1436❩ ❛ Everything is evolving, everything is falling apart. ❜ ❨1437❩ ❛ We’ve all been raised believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. ❜ ❨1438❩ ❛ Don’t you have other things to do? ❜ ❨1439❩ ❛ Prove you’re alive. If you don’t claim your humanity you will become a statistic. ❜ ❨1440❩ ❛ You have been warned. ❜ ❨1441❩ ❛ If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t. ❜ ❨1442❩ ❛ It’s not love or anything, but I think I like you, too. ❜ ❨1443❩ ❛ If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person? ❜ ❨1444❩ ❛ Why did I cause so much pain? ❜ ❨1445❩ ❛ The lower you fall, the higher you’ll fly. ❜ ❨1446❩ ❛ Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer. ❜ ❨1447❩ ❛ May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. ❜ ❨1448❩ ❛ Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head. ❜ ❨1449❩ ❛ We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. ❜ ❨1450❩ ❛ The girl is infectious human waste. ❜ ❨1451❩ ❛ I want to destroy everything beautiful I’ll never have. ❜ ❨1452❩ ❛ On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. ❜ ❨1453❩ ❛ If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? ❜ ❨1454❩ ❛ It is like you’re never really awake; but you’re never really asleep. ❜ ❨1455❩ ❛ Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave. ❜ ❨1456❩ ❛ A moment is the most you could ever expect from perfection. ❜ ❨1457❩ ❛ The people you’re trying to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. ❜ ❨1458❩ ❛ You have to give up! ❜ ❨1459❩ ❛ Reject the basic assumptions of civilisation, especially the importance of material possessions. ❜ ❨1460❩ ❛ Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. ❜ ❨1461❩ ❛ You have to realise that someday you will die, Until you know that, you are useless. ❜ ❨1462❩ ❛ A tiger can smile. A snake will say it loves you. ❜ ❨1463❩ ❛ Lies make us evil. ❜ ❨1464❩ ❛ If you died right now, how would you feel about your life? ❜ ❨1465❩ ❛ You always kill the one you love. ❜ ❨1466❩ ❛ Maybe we should always assume the worst. ❜ ❨1467❩ ❛ Put a gun to my head and paint the wall with my brains. ❜ ❨1468❩ ❛ Which is worse? Hell or nothing? ❜ ❨1469❩ ❛ A minute of perfection is worth the effort. ❜ ❨1470❩ ❛ You’re going to die, tonight. You might die in one second or in one hour, you decide. ❜ ❨1471❩ ❛ Lie to me. Tell me the first thing off the top of your head. Make something up. ❜ ❨1472❩ ❛ I don’t give a shit. I have a gun. ❜ ❨1473❩ ❛ I know who you are. I know where you live. ❜ ❨1474❩ ❛ Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your life. ❜ ❨1475❩ ❛ My philosophy of life is that I can die at any moment. And the tragedy of my life is that I do not. ❜ ❨1476❩ ❛ Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. You can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you. ❜ ❨1477❩ ❛ There are a lot of things we don’t want to know about the people we love. ❜ ❨1478❩ ❛ We just had a near-life experience. ❜ ❨1479❩ ❛ If people think you are dying, they give you their full attention. They listen instead of just waiting for their turn to speak. ❜ ❨1480❩ ❛ I am nothing, and not even that. ❜ ❨1481❩ ❛ This isn’t really death. —- We’ll be legends. We won’t grow old. ❜ ❨1482❩ ❛ Stop trying to control everything and just let go. Let go. ❜ ❨1483❩ ❛ The amazing miracle of death, when one second you’re walking and talking, and the next second you’re an object. ❜ ❨1484❩ ❛ Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved. ❜ ❨1485❩ ❛ I never thought about how important the sky was until I didn't have one. ❜ ❨1486❩ ❛ Dreams are like that: they go in and out of memories and scenes, but they're never real. They're never real, and I hate them because they aren't. ❜ ❨1487❩ ❛ Power isn’t control at all — power is strength, and giving that strength to others. ❜ ❨1488❩ ❛ A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger. ❜ ❨1489❩ ❛ A leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own. ❜ ❨1490❩ ❛ In the end, we are alone. ❜ ❨1491❩ ❛ It is like a piece of my soul is lost, empty. ❜ ❨1492❩ ❛ If my life on Earth must end, let it end with a promise. Let it end with hope. ❜ ❨1493❩ ❛ Sorry? Sorry isn't enough. ❜ ❨1494❩ ❛ Every single thing I ever loved is beyond my reach now. Everything I ever wanted. Everything I ever was. ❜ ❨1495❩ ❛ Will you stay with me? ❜ ❨1496❩ ❛ A leader doesn't make pawns - he makes people. ❜ ❨1497❩ ❛ Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. ❜ ❨1498❩ ❛ It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me. ❜ ❨1499❩ ❛ There is nothing between us but rain. There is nothing between us at all. ❜ ❨1500❩ ❛ I like a little chaos. ❜

[yikestripes]

For the First Time

humans of tumblr, friends and fans of my blog, mamma mia here we go again. ya girl is BACK and better than ever with her new obsession, criminal fuckin minds. this was such a fun one shot to write; enjoy!

Summary: You’ve been working for the FBI for 3 years now, and have never seen the sights. Spencer,  of course, volunteers to take you along for a wild ride. 

“Spence!” You called as you entered the BAU, your bag swinging wildly on your shoulder as your crazed (Y/E/C) eyes searched for the lanky doctor. Although it was mildly quiet despite the typing on a few keyboards and phones ringing here and there, the office was nowhere near as excitable and filled as it usually was on a Friday morning. The man in question poked his head out of the break room, quickly accompanied by the rest of his body as he strode across the catwalk.

“Yeah, (Y/N)?” He materialized at your side and held out a coffee mug with your name on it. You grabbed it gratefully and sucked down a few gulps before recollecting your thoughts.

“I was up half the night thinking about it, and I think I finally understand!” Spencer gave you a confused look, scrunching up his face as he thought through whatever it was he said that could have confused you.

Compared to the other members of the BAU, you were the only one who understood what he was saying at least 95% of the time- something that Spencer found both impressive and is what initially drew him to you. Here you were, 3 years later, on the anniversary of your joining the BAU. Little did you know that this was the day Spencer had realized his feelings toward you were a lot more than friendly. Nevertheless, the boy genius was terrified of how you would react, whether that be to laugh at him or possibly worse- feel sorry for him.

Taking in the confused look on his face, you giggled and your hand flew to his arm in excitement.

“The Star Trek theory you were talking about to Morgan and I yesterday- I finally figured it out!” Spencer smiled and took a careful sip of his coffee, taking in the easy-going smile that was plastered across your face and the accompanying gleam in your eyes. They say that the eyes are the window to the soul, something that based on his current job, was very apparent to him. He could spend hours staring into your eyes, whether it be to distinguish each different color that presented itself and understand why your particular set of eyes were so beautiful, or to finally get some sort of a grasp on why he fell so hard for you so quickly. It would take a lifetime, he thought, to finally understand what made you so different from all the other people he had met in his lifetime.

Meanwhile, you had been going on for a solid 3 minutes about his Star Trek theory, he could only nod along, buried so far in his own thoughts that he couldn’t even hear you.

“You know?” You finally said, taking a second to catch your breath. Just like Spencer, you had a hard time with knowing when to stop talking without being told to do so. You tended to ramble, so if no one stopped you, you would go on forever.

Spencer simply smiled.

“Yeah. I know.”

Several hours had passed when you were finally able to move the mountain of paperwork from your desk to Hotch’s. You grinned, this was one of your favorite parts of paperwork days. You fiddled with the stack in your hand to reach up and knock on Hotch’s door, when you heard him already saying come in from the other side. He knew you were coming, considering how clockwork-like your work habits were.

“Hey Hotch, these need to be processed for Monday.” Hotch tried his best not to crack a smile at the smirk displayed on your face, and give you the pleasure of making him laugh. He thought you were hilarious, constantly having everyone in stitches throughout the day to make the reality of your careers a little less heavy- which is one of the reasons every person at the BAU loved you immediately. You were sarcastic and creative, and had great dad jokes to boot, ready at any opportunity.

“Thank you. Does Garcia need to see any of this to upload it into the system?” He asked, returning to the stone man he was previously.

“Nope.” You popped the P as you headed towards the door.

“(Y/L/N).” Hotch said. You turned around and he hadn’t even looked up at you. “You did some excellent work this week; grab Reid on your way out, I don’t want to see either of you for at least 3 days.” You grinned and wished him a good weekend, as he watched you walk out smiling. He shook his head and buried his head back into his work.

“Hey Professor,” You called as you bounded down the stairs. Reid flashed you a tight lipped smile as he so often did, and raised his eyebrows in response to the nickname.

“We’re done for 3 whole days!” You said as you packed your stuff haphazardly into your backpack. Spencer grinned and began packing his own things much more meticulously.

“Do you have anything exciting planned for this weekend?” He asked.

“Nah, unless you count going home to Gerald something exciting.” You said with a laugh. Reid smiled at the thought of the orange tabby that was oh so fond of him.

“Did you know that cats are actually an excellent judge of character? In a newspaper article I read from the early 90s, cats are actually extremely perceptive of humans upon first or second meeting, meaning that they can distinguish between good and bad based on a human character and emotion.” He said.

“I KNEW my cat hated Steven for a reason!” You said, recalling how your cat would do nothing but glare and his at your ex boyfriend, who ended up using you. “Do you have anything going on?” You asked. Spence shook his head, before looking at you with a small grin.

“How long have you been living in Virginia?” He asked.

“I don’t know, 3 years? Whenever I started working here I guess, why?” You hadn’t really given it much thought, it seemed like whatever life you had been living before this one seemed so far away. It hadn’t originally occurred to you that today was your 3rd anniversary of being with the BAU, and meeting Spencer.

“Have you ever been to the tourist sights?” He asked, pausing his stride outside of the elevator. You thought about it for a minute, and realized quickly where he was going with this.

“Nope! I always thought they were way too crowded for me whenever I got the free time to go.”

Spencer grinned. “Well then, Miss (Y/L/N), today is your lucky day.” You grinned back. No idea could have been better for your third anniversary of knowing and secretly loving Doctor Spencer Reid.

You had parted ways at your cars to shower and change, before meeting up around 8 pm so Spencer could show you around without tourists.

His hands were deep in his pockets as usual, as he carefully explained each monument in great detail. Considering you were a history major in college before going to FBI training and schooling, you were appreciative of Spencer’s long winded rambling, even able to inject your own knowledge in the quiet moments.

“And last but certainly not least, one of my favorite places in the city.” He said as you entered the World War II memorial. The water from the fountain was glistening in the moonlight as you took a deep breath, both from the breathless feeling Spencer gave you whenever he was around, and the sight before you. The stars and the moon lit up the night sky before you as the memorial itself framed it. No wonder this was one of Spencer’s favorite spaces, it was breathtaking. Then again, so was he. Very fitting.

“Spence…” You began, unsure where to go. You took a seat on the stairs behind you and took in the feeling in that moment, where you felt so relaxed and happy, beside your favorite person in the world.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” He said, looking at you and smiling softly. “Really, really beautiful.” he whispered. You glanced in his direction to see his attention was focused on you, not the sky or the fountain beneath it. Your breath hitched in your throat.

“(Y/N),” Spencer swallowed hard and licked his lips quickly, a habit he had when he was nervous about something he had to say. “I-I don’t know how to say this but I’ve kind of been in love with you for about 2 years now. Sure, I knew you were beautiful the first day you stepped into the BAU but once I got to know you, the real you, when you really let your guard down and allowed me to fully understand how truly intelligent, kind, and hilarious you are is when I fell hard for you and I’m sorry it took me so long to say it but I’ve always been so afraid that you wouldn’t fe-” You grabbed Spencer’s face and pressed your lips onto his, immediately feeling him soften into the kiss after a moment of anxious surprise.

You pulled away first, your eyes wide and your mouth hanging slightly agape. Spencer just looked mildly surprised, before softening into a shy smile.

“I love you too, Spence. I knew the day I met you, that you were going to be the most unforgettable human being I had ever known.” You said softly, rubbing your thumb gently across his cheek.

“Um,” He looked down and flicked his eyes upwards, gently tucking a piece of hair behind his ear. “Can I kiss you again?”

You grinned and met him halfway, the second kiss equally as sweet as the first.

[frangipanidownunder]

100 degrees of separation: fic

For @perplexistan who requested: M and S at the UH, where there is no air conditioning, and it is a record-setting, sweltering summer day. Set post season 11? Rated T, I guess.

By lunch-time it was 95 degrees and the temperature was still creeping higher. The ceiling fan whumped pitifully, simply spreading the misery around the kitchen. Even with the blind firmly closed, the heat wedged itself against the window and permeated everything. The clock on the wall titched slowly, as though the minutes were being squeezed through molasses to tick on.

Mulder peeled his forearms from the table and brought the sports pages with him. Scully puffed a wisp of stray hair from her forehead, smiling at his grapple with the newsprint. As she leaned across to help him, his attention was trapped by the bead of sweat trickling down her cleavage, weaving over the spray of rose freckles, and all his irritation at the humidity evaporated, as he watched it disappear into the V of her tank-top. He licked his lips.

“Thirsty?” she murmured, in a tone that suggested she knew exactly what had caught his eye. “We need to stay hydrated.”

“Kinda,” he said, finally removing the last of the newspaper.

“I know you love the game, Mulder but you didn’t need to tattoo it on your skin. She took his hand and twisted his arm over. “Look at that,” she said, her voice perkier, “Yankees beat the Red Sox 11 to 1.”

He read the print that had marked the heel of his thumb and along the grooves of his wrist. “Severino finished 13 and 2. Not too shabby, Scully.”

“Whatever you say, Mulder. I’m going to make iced tea. Care for some?”

“Sure. Price finished 9 and 6. But I can’t make out the Washington scores.” He rummaged through the ripped paper but ended up flinging strips into the air where they wafted momentarily on the rising heat like ticker-tape before settling willy-nilly over the table and floor. Scully sighed and he couldn’t make out if it was because she was standing in front of the open refrigerator or if it was a precursor to her snapping at him to clean up his mess. Taking no chances, he set about gathering the remnants of the pages and scrunching them into a ball.

“Don’t even think about throwing that at me,” Scully said from deep inside the ice box.

His mother used to say something about women having eyes in the backs of their heads and as a small boy it used to creep him out enough to stop him sleeping. When his sister was born, he turned her over just to check. Scully let the door shut and turned just as he closed the gap between them. He gathered her in his arms and welcomed her cool front.

“Ice, ice baby,” he sang, rocking his hips side to side with hers. She played along for a moment before shrugging away from him and setting the ice cube tray on the table.

“Grab that for me,” she asked, nodding at the ornate mason jar on the side. “I’ve added mint and lemon. Should be really refreshing. My mom used to make this recipe for us…” She looked up at him, eyes a little wetter than before and he tossed the paper ball into the trash can, nodding his understanding at her. It still cut her. It cut him too, their cumulative losses over the decades. If he had learned anything from their experiences, it was that they were each the only person in the world who truly understood the other. Love was nothing to do with it, though it helped. For the most part, anyway. 

He watched her drop ice into the jar, took the brewed tea and poured it over the cubes so they crackled and split a little. The lemon slices rose up the sides along with the mint sprigs and the aroma put him in mind of midsummer evenings in the Red Stag’s beer garden listening to Wimbledon commentary as the Pimms pitcher sloshed on the rickety, silvered table-top.

Like the smell, however, the cool action of the drink dissipated far too quickly and after ten minutes, they were both sweating again.

“Hyperhidrosis,” she mused, pressing a wet wad of paper towel to her forehead and chest.

“If that’s your medical diagnosis,” he said, unsticking each thigh from the chair, “how does one combat its symptoms?”

She scoffed and flopped back, angling her arms at 45 degrees, circling her wrists back and forth. “Someone tell Mother Nature to dial it back in a little. She’s being a bitch.”

“She’s a bit pissed at our inability to address the climate situation and I’d say she’s got fair cause.”

“But humidity at over 90 per cent, Mulder, that’s more than a bit pissed, that’s white-hot rage.”

“Hm-mm,” he said, turning over his cell. “If it gets to 100 degrees, I’ll expire. How do Aussies live like this?”

“They have a/c everywhere,” she said.

“Uh-huh, they probably even have it in their refrigerators.” He tried to laugh at his own joke but the heat stole it from his mouth.

“More people die from the cold in Australia than the heat. Their housing isn’t built for the winters. Temperatures in the south of the country are low outside of the three months of summer. And you won’t expire, Mulder. Not on my watch.”

There it was again. That understanding, that support. Her answer about deaths in Australia didn’t really surprise him. Housing in England was similarly deficient, just for the heat, not the cold. Radiators and terraces and wall to wall carpets helped heat homes during winters, but he remembered nights in Oxford where July humidity kept him awake, tossing and turning in his bedsit while the beat of a rave rose and fell from the neighbouring farmland. He wasn’t sure about the mortality rate but it always felt like Death was laughing at the poor souls crushed into tiny living quarters.

“What’s the hottest you’ve ever been, Scully? Aside from that time you wore that sleek black skirt suit where I could see the outline of your stocking top.” He chuckled at her mock-offended expression.

“Rescuing you from Arecibo is pretty high on the list of Times Dana Scully Nearly Melted.”

“You didn’t rescue me.”

“What would you call it, then, Mr George ‘Proof of Contact’ Hale?” Her voice rose up the scale of indignation a notch.

“I didn’t ask you to come. We weren’t even partners then. You just…invited yourself. And, by the way, I got us out of there like a Hollywood stunt driver.”

“I had to have months of physio to straighten my spine after that little trip to the rainforest. Jesus, Mulder.”

“You drive like that all the time,” he countered.

“Do not,” she snipped, and pushed her chair back. “And invited myself? Really?”

She disappeared for a bit and he lay his head down on the table but a pool of warm sweat gathered on his skin so that his forehead slipped away, juddering across the surface. He looked up as Scully came back into the kitchen and blinked away the droplets that ran into his eyes. “Are you putting linen in the freezer?”

“Yes. And no, I’m not mad. You’ll thank me later.”

She disappeared again and when she returned the next time, she was carrying a scalpel and a pair of surgical scissors.

“You are mad,” he said, rubbing a hand over his chin. “Just not the insane kind. What have I done, Scully?”

“Nothing yet. Get me two empty water bottles.” He did and she nodded to the scalpel. “Puncture holes in them at regular intervals and then cut the bottoms off.” When he’d finished, she’d come back with a ball of string. He watched as she tied the bottles, upside down, to the back of the fan, looping the string through the holes and around the grating.

“I take it back,” he said, “this is a work of genius.”

She grinned, hair plastered to her face, skin sheen with sweat and in a flash, it took him back to that graveyard in Bellefleur. “I’ll get the ice.”

“And some salt. And pour more water in the ice tray,” she called after him.

Side by side, they sat cross-legged in front of the fan as the cool air blasted them. His cell registered 100 degrees and he flashed it to her.

“You saved me,” he said.

“Again,” she said, smugly.

“Who’s keeping score?”

“You are.” She batted his hand away and let her head hang back, the curls of her frizzed hair straightening when the fan blew over her. Her nipples protruded tantalisingly and he shifted on his seat.

“What’s the coldest you’ve ever been? Icy Cape? Antarctica?”

She turned to him. “No,” she said, tilting her head. “It was when you let Agent Fowley back on the scene.”

“Ouch,” he said. “No anaesthetic for your surgical barbs.”

“Shut up, Mulder. I’m getting cool.”

“Hmmm, you’ve always been cool, Scully.”

Her giggle was girlish and his temperature rose despite her makeshift air conditioner. “Any chance of a…?”

“In this heat? Absolutely none,” she declared, but he could always melt her icy edges so he closed his eyes, held his silence and bade his time. Their deep understanding would get him past her 100 degrees of separation.

[maximelebled]

My quick review of the ASUS XG27UQ monitor (4K, HDR, 120Hz)

I originally wanted to tweet this series of bullet points out but it was getting way too long, so here goes! I got this to replace a PG278Q, which was starting to develop odd white stains, and never had good color reproduction in the first place (TN film drawbacks, very low gamma resulting in excessively bright shadows, under-saturated shadows, etc.)

The hardware aesthetic is alright! The bezels may feel a bit large to some people, but I don’t mind them at all. If you’re a fan of the no-bezel look, you’ll probably hate it. There is a glowing logo on the back that you can customize (Static Cyan is my recommendation), but it isn’t bright enough to be used as bias lighting, which would’ve been nice.

The built-in stand is decent; it comes with a tacky and distracting light projection feature at the bottom. It felt quite stable, though I don’t care about it because it got instantly replaced by an Ergotron LX arm. (I have two now, I really recommend them in spite of their price.) 

The coating is a little grainy and this is noticeable on pure colors! You can kinda see the texture come through, a bit more than I’d like. Not a huge deal though.

The rest of the review will be under the cut.

The default color preset (”racing mode”), which the monitor is calibrated against, is very vivid and saturated. It looks great! But it’s inherently inaccurate, which bothers me, so I don’t like it. It looks like as if sRGB got stretched into the expanded gamut of the monitor.

sRGB “emulation” looks very similar to my Dell U2717D, whose sRGB mode is factory-calibrated. However, the XG27UQ’s sRGB mode has lower gamma (brighter shadows), so while the colors are accurate, the gamma is not. It feels 1.8-ish. Unless you were in a bright room, it would be inappropriate for work that needs to have accurate shadows. This mode also locks other controls, so it’s not the most useful, but the brightness is set well on it, so it is usable!

The “User Mode” settings use the calibrated racing mode as a starting point, which is a big relief. So it’s possible to tweak the color temperature and the saturation from there! I checked pure white against my Dell monitor and my smartphone (S9+) and tried to reach a reasonable 3-way compromise between them, knowing that the Dell is most likely the most accurate, and that Samsung also allegedly calibrates their high-end smartphones well. My configuration ended up being R:90/G:95/B:100 + SAT:42. This matches the saturation of the U2717D sRGB mode fairly closely. You also get to choose between 1.8, 2.2, and 2.5 gamma too, which is not too granular, but great to have. It kinda feels like my ideal match is between 2.2 and 2.5, but 2.2 is fine.

The color gamma according to lagom.nl looked fine, but I had to open the picture in Paint, otherwise it was DPI-scaled in the browser, and that messed with the way it works!! (That website is an amazing resource for quick monitor checks.)

Colors are however somewhat inaccurate in this mode. It’s easy to see by comparing the tweaked User Mode vs. sRGB emulation. There are some rather sizeable hue shifts in certain cases. I believe part of this is caused by the saturation tweak not operating properly.

Here’s a photo of what the Photoshop color picker looks like when Saturation is set to 0 on the monitor, vs. what a proper grayscale conversion should be. It’s definitely not using the right coefficients. 

So in practice, when using the Racing & User modes, compared to the U2717D sRGB, here’s a few examples of what I see:

Reds are colder (towards the purple side) & oversaturated

Bright yellow (255,215,90) is undersaturated

Bright green (120,200,130) is undersaturated

Dark green (0,105,60) is fine

Magenta (220,13,128) is oversaturated

Dark reds & brown (150,20,20 to 90,15,10) is oversaturated

Cyan (0,180,240) is fine 

Pink (230,115,170) is fine

Some shades of bright saturated blue (58,48,220) have the biggest shifts.

The TF2 skin tone becomes slightly desaturated and a bit colder

It’s not inaccurate to the point of being distracting, and you always have the  sRGB mode (with flawed gamma?) to check things with, but it’s definitely not ideal, and some of these shifts go far enough that I wouldn’t recommend this monitor for color work that needs to be very accurate.

I’ve went back and forth, User vs sRGB, several times, on my most recent work (True Sight 2019 sequences). I’ve found the differences were acceptable for the most part; they bothered me the most during the Chronosphere sequence, in which the hazy sunset atmosphere turned a bit into to a rose gold tint, which wasn’t unpleasant at all — and looked quite pretty! — but it wasn’t what I did.

I’m coming from the point of view of a “prosumer” who cares about color accuracy, but who ultimately recognizes that this quest is impossible in the face of so many devices out there being inaccurate or misconfigured one way or the other. In the end, my position is more pragmatic, and I feel that you gotta be able to see how your stuff’s gonna look on the devices where it’ll actually be watched. So while I’ve done color grading on a decent-enough sRGB-calibrated monitor, I’ve always checked it against the inaccurate PG278Q, and I’ve done a little bit of compromising to keep my color work looking alright even once gamma shifted. And so, now, I’ll also be getting to see what my colors look like on a monitor that doesn’t quite restrain itself to sRGB gamut properly.

Well, at least, all of that stuff is out of the box, but...

TFTCentral (one of the most trustworthy monitor review websites, in my opinion) has found suspiciously similar shifts. But after calbration, their unit passed with flying colors (pun intended), so if you really care about this sort of stuff and happen to have a colorimeter... you should give it a try!

I hope one day we’ll be able to load and apply an ICC/ICM profile computer-wide, instead of only being able to load a simple gamma curve on the GPU with third-party tools like DisplayCAL. Even if it had to squeeze the gamut a bit...

Also, there are dynamic dimming / auto contrast ratio features which could potentially be useful in limited scenarios if you don’t care about color accuracy and want to maximize brightness. I believe they are forced on for HDR. But you will probably not care at all.

IPS glow is not very present on my unit; less than on my U2717D. However, when it starts to show up (more than a 30°-ish angle away), it shows up more. UPDATED: after some more time with the monitor, I wanna say that, in fact, IPS glow isit's slightly stronger, and shows up sooner (as in, from broader angles). It requires me to sit a greater distance from the monitor in order to not have it show up and impede dark scenes. It is worse than on my U2717D.

Backlight bleed, on the other hand, is there, and a little bit noticeable. On my unit, there’s a little bit of blue-ish bleed on the lower left corner, and some dark-grey-orange bleed for a good third of the upper-left. However, in practice, and to my eyes, it doesn’t bother me, even when I look for it. It ain’t perfect, but I’ve definitely seen worse, especially from ASUS. The photo above was taken at 100% brightness, and I’ve tried to make it just a tad brighter than what my eyes see, so hopefully it’s a decent sample.

Dead pixels: on my unit, I have 5 stuck dead green subpixels overall. There are 4 in a diamond pattern somewhat down and right to the center of the screen, and another one, a bit to the right of that spot. All of them kinda “shimmer” a little bit, in the sense that they become stronger or weaker based on my angle of view. They’re a bummer but I haven’t found them to be a hindrance. Took me a few days to even notice them for the first time, after all.

HDR is just about meaningless and uses some global dimming techniques, as well as stuff that feels like... you know that Intel HD driver feature that brightens the content on the screen, while lowering the panel backlight power in tandem, to save power, but it kinda flattens (and sometimes clips) highlights? It kinda looks like that sometimes. Without local dimming, HDR is just about meaningless.

Unfortunately, the really nice HDR support in computer monitors is still looking like it’s going to be at the very least a year out, and even longer for sub-1000 price ranges. (I was holding out for the PG27UQX at first, but it still has no word on availability, a whole year after being announced, and will probably cost over two grand, so no thanks.)

G-Sync (variable refresh rate) support is... not there yet?! The latest driver does not recognize the monitor as being compatible with the feature. And it turns out that the product page says that G-Sync support is currently being applied for. Huh. I thought they had special chips in those monitors solely for the feature, but it’s possible this one does it another way? (The same way that Freesync monitors do it?)

DSC (Display Stream Compression) enables 4K 120Hz to work through a single DisplayPort cable, without chroma subsampling. And it’s working for me, which came as a surprise, as I was under the impression this feature required a 2000-series Turing GPUs. (I have a 1080 Ti.) I was wrong about this, it’s 144 Hz that requires DSC. And I don’t have it on this Pascal card. But I don’t really care since I prefer to run this monitor at 120 Hz, as it’s a multiple of the 60 Hz monitor next to it.

Windows DPI scaling support is okay now. Apps that are DPI-aware, and the vast majority of them are now, scale back and forth between 150% and 100% really well as they get dragged between the monitors! The only program I’ve had issues with is good old Winamp, which acted as if it was 100% on the XG27UQ... and shrinked down on another monitor. So I asked it to override DPI scaling behaviour (”scaling performed by: application”), which keeps the player skin at 100% on every monitor, but any call to system fonts and UI (Bento skin’s playlist + Settings panel) are still at 150%. So I had to set the playlist font size to 7 for it to look OK on the non-scaled monitor!

A few apps misbehave in interesting ways; TeamSpeak, for example, seen above, scales everything back from 150% to 100%, and there is no blurriness, but the “larger layout” (spacing, etc.) sticks.

Games look great with 4K in 27 inches. Well, I’ve only really tried Dota 2 so far, but man does it get sharp, especially with the game’s FXAA disabled. It was already a toss-up at 1440p, but at 4K I would argue you might as well keep it disabled. However, going from 2560x1440 to 3840x2160 requires some serious horsepower. It may look like a +50% upgrade in pixels, but it’s actually a +125% increase! (3.68 to 8.29 million pixels.) For a 1080 Ti, maxed-out Dota 2 at 1440p 120hz is really trivial, but once you go to 4K, not anymore...  you could always lower resolution scale though! (Not an elegant solution if you like to use sharpening filters though, looking at you RDR2.)

Overall, the XG27UQ is a good monitor, and I’m satisfied with my purchase, although slightly disappointed by the strong IPS glow and the few dead subpixels. 7/10

[lareverie-18k]

Potential pt.1

One major fear I experience is the idea that we do not want to see what would become of us if we are at our absolute peak. Maybe it's just me, but being able to see the max potential you have could either surprise or disappoint. The unknown and the feeling of not knowing whether our best is good enough can be daunting to try and figure out.

Depending on circumstances and initiative, we have the freedom to make choices and choose our paths. We can decide what we would like to do, where we would like to go, and how we should go about achieving our goals. For example, one could decide to let things flow or take a more proactive approach to getting things done. There is also the option of not making the effort.

It can even be hard to admit the fact that to avoid facing the reality of our full potential we hide behind excuses or external factors such as placing blame on those around us. It can be very easy to find an excuse. To accept what you have been given, circumstance wise, or to point fingers at those around for you not reaching your potential. Accepting responsibility, on the other hand, is much harder to do and can be an indicator of growth. There comes a time when you should see that you have the power to steer changes in your life. Sometimes it may feel like that power isn't there, however you always have even just a little bit that can be used to alter any situation.

Facing your full potential can be daunting. This is why there are some times where I slack off or hold off a bit. In a sense, it's better to have a bit of a leeway knowing you did 90-95% instead of 100% because it would hurt to know if your best wasn't up to par. It's scary to see what our potential really is and it may hurt if it isn't what we expected it to be. Your potential isn't capped even though it may like that sometimes.

Maybe this is a common sentiment or not. However, this feeling comes to me from time to time. I guess the best method to overcome this, is to let go of the fear and see how far you can go. From there you could see if there is the possibility of inching a step further than the "limit" of where your potential is.

Put a plant in an environment where it has all the tools to succeed and watch it grow. It may even surprise itself how much potential it has to grow.

Until next time.....take care

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #393

Top Ten Favourite Moments in Videogames

So apparently this week we had International Videogame Day, or somesuch. Anyway, it felt like a sufficiently tenuous reason for me to talk about videogames.

One tweet I saw asked its readers for their favourite videogame moments, and – as is my wont – I could not be contained by Twitter’s meagre parameters and decided instead to turn it into the subject of my latest “blog”.

So here, then, are my favouritest moments in the history of videogames. Most of these are a bit old, perhaps because in my advancing years it takes more thoroughly shock or awe me; also I feel like I just played games more when I was a kid or a student. Also, what with me being me, some of these perhaps feel more left-field than lists you’d see on conventional gaming websites; I’ve never played Final Fantasy VII for more than half an hour, so I couldn’t give a toss who dies at the end (is it even at the end? It might happen at minute 31 for all I know). Hope, here you’ll find a nice combination of Amiga games, decades-old PC games, and something that came free with Windows 95.

Also, just what is a “moment”? I’ve tried to define it as one precise action; a revelation, a line, a discovery. There may be one two bendings of that rule, but in general I’ve tried to keep it to short sudden snaps of gaming, rather than whole levels, weapons, or gameplay styles. So, for instance, one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in gaming is chucking cars about and jumping across rooftops in Crackdown, but that feels like the game itself that I love, rather than a moment.

Anyway, enough preliminary blather. Let’s see what I dredged from my subconscious this time around.

Oh, and spoiler alert, I guess.

“How to Get Ahead in Navigating” (The Secret of Monkey Island, 1990): it’s an old joke, really, but a classic. I got stuck on this moment, frantically trying everything in my inventory to get the cannibals to give me their navigators’ head, and when I final offered them this brochure, with that title, oh, the wheels clicked into place and I understood. I knew then what this game was, what I was, how good games could be. Joyous and transcendent.

The Super Gravity Gun (Half-Life 2, 2004): you spend a whole game picking up barrels and chucking around paint cans with your magic Physics Cannon, all the while wishing you could shunt people out the way, and all of a sudden – wham! – your prayers are answered. Wacky, hilarious, emergent gameplay ensues.

The Flood (Halo: Combat Evolved, 2001): Halo starts out as a James Cameron film and then suddenly, without warning, turns into a Dario Argento one. The Flood twist comes out of nowhere and utterly upends the gameplay. Although the Flood levels get repetitive, that initial surprise still delights.

“This Was a Triumph” (Portal, 2007): musical numbers in games remain a sad rarity, so this tuneful finale was not only a delight but a surprise. It’s in-canon, a great, great track, and manages to be both funny and supremely creepy. I’ve never completed Portal 2, but I’m expecting great things.

“Would You Kindly?” (BioShock, 2007): games that play with the notion of gameplay itself really float my battleship (SuperHot nearly made this list), and the twist that all your standard objective-following in BioShock was really a sinister Manchurian plot by the Big Bad was a rug-pulling mind-blower. The subsequent boss battle could not ever hope to compare.

Revan Revealed (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, 2003): speaking of finding out you’re the bad guy… Darth Revan is built up as this supreme source of evil, only recently defeated. Finding out it’s you and the Jedi essentially mind-wiped you is a shock that – in my case, at least – really affected how I played the game (I didn’t go evil, though, I’m far too nice).

The Carnival of the Damned (Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, 1991): I played the Monkey Islands at a formative time, so the way MI2 messes with structure and canon absolutely blew my mind. The combination of familial revelation, time-bending setting, and intense Star Wars in-jokery, was another illustration to me of how multi-faceted and, well, hilarious games could be.

Selecting the Difficulty (Quake, 1996): it’s hard to stress just how revolutionary Quake seemed back then. I’d played 3D games before, but nothing that felt as fluid or solid. id knew this, and used every chance to reinforce just how big a deal Quake was. To whit: no simple menu. You’re plonked in a creepy 3D church, with three baths: a bridge for Easy Mode, a broken bridge to jump for Normal, and a broken bridge over lava for Hard. Finding the hidden path to Nightmare mode was also a fun challenge.

The Blast Chamber (Half-Life, 1998): another landmark in 90s PC gaming, Half-Life wowed not so much with technical prowess but with intricate artistry. Dynamic sound was a rarity twenty years ago, and having to muffle your footsteps as you avoided then fought against a huge sound-seeking monster was a tense and utterly unique experience. Half-Life’s gorgeous sound design – echoey metal, clipped tiles, electronic beeping – helped enormously.

The Cards Dance (Solitaire, 1990): is there a more joyous representation of victory? You finally get rid of your last card, and – boom! – every single card leaps from its pile and bounces across the screen, trailing echoes of itself, forming criss-crossing bridges of cloned cards, bunched-up borders giving way to wide-angle faces. A firework explosion of lo-res digital cards, supremely satisfying, even more so given the staid nature of a freebie Solitaire game.

So there we are. This was tough; many moments missed the list. One in particular was from Deus Ex, but I struggled to really find a hook to hang it on; rather, it was an almost random occurrence which illustrated the depth of that title’s emergent gameplay. On my first playthrough, I was caught in a firefight with my brother Paul Denton; we awoke in some government facility, and after I rescued him we made our escape and he became “the man in the van”, a voice in my ear for the remainder of the game. I obviously assumed that this was scripted; that both JC Denton and his brother were supposed to get caught in that scene. But then on a second playthrough, he died; my brother was killed and off the game. His role as exposition/quest-giver was filled by someone else. I just couldn’t get over how great that was; to potentially sideline what felt like a huge character. I was incredibly impressed. But still not sure how to categorise that moment, especially as other people may not have experienced it.

But on the whole – games, eh? Momentous.

[holden-norgorov]

Ranking Buffy The Vampire Slayer Episodes.

A+ [100]

1.     5x16: “The Body” – 100/100. 2.     4x22: “Restless” – 100/100. 3.     6x07: “Once More, with Feeling” – 100/100. 4.     5x22: “The Gift” – 100/100. 5.     2x22: “Becoming, pt. 02” – 100/100. 6.     4x10: “Hush” – 100/100. 7.     5x07: “Fool for Love” – 100/100. 8.     2x17: “Passion” – 100/100. 9.     7x07: “Conversations with Dead People” – 100/100. 10.   7x05: “Selfless” – 100/100. 11.   2x14: “Innocence” – 100/100. 12.   4x16: “Who Are You?” – 100/100.

A [95-99]

13.   3x22: “Graduation Day, pt. 02” – 99/100. 14.   6x17: “Normal Again” – 98/100. 15.   2x19: “I Only Have Eyes for You” – 97/100. 16.   6x13: “Dead Things” – 97/100. 17.   3x09: “The Wish” – 97/100. 18.   7x17: “Lies My Parents Told Me” – 97/100. 19.   6x03: “After Life” – 96/100. 20.   5x05: “No Place Like Home” – 96/100. 21.   3x21: “Graduation Day, pt. 01” – 95/100. 22.   2x13: “Surprise” – 95/100.

A- [90-94]

23.   6x20: “Villains” – 94/100. 24.   3x15: “Consequences” – 94/100. 25.   3x07: “Revelations” – 94/100. 26.   3x08: “Lover’s Walk” – 94/100. 27.   7x22: “Chosen” – 93/100. 28.   6x01: “Bargaining, pt. 01” – 93/100. 29.   2x06: “Halloween” – 93/100. 30.   3x12: “Helpless” – 93/100. 31.   6x22: “Grave” – 92/100. 32.   3x16: “Doppelgangland” – 92/100. 33.   4x09: “Something Blue” – 92/100. 34.   3x06: “Band Candy” – 92/100. 35.   7x16: “Storyteller” – 92/100. 36.   6x19: “Seeing Red” – 91/100. 37.   2x21: “Becoming, pt. 01” – 91/100. 38.   4x20: “The Yoko Factor” – 91/100. 39.   2x03: “School Hard” – 91/100. 40.   6x08: “Tabula Rasa” – 90/100. 41.   5x12: “Checkpoint” – 90/100. 42.   3x03: “Faith, Hope and Trick” – 90/100. 43.   4x08: “Pangs” – 90/100. 44.   2x01: “When She Was Bad” – 90/100. 45.   7x20: “Touched” – 90/100. 46.   5x21: “The Weight of the World” – 90/100.

B+ [85-89]

47.   6x21: “Two to Go” – 89/100. 48.   7x15: “Get It Done” – 89/100. 49.   4x04: “Fear, Itself” – 89/100. 50.   5x17: “Forever” – 89/100. 51.   3x18: “Earshot” – 88/100. 52.   5x18: “Intervention” – 88/100. 53.   6x18: “Entropy” – 88/100. 54.   5x19: “Tough Love” – 87/100. 55.   4x15: “This Year’s Girl” – 87/100. 56.   3x19: “Choices” – 87/100. 57.   5x13: “Blood Ties” – 87/100. 58.   6x09: “Smashed” – 87/100. 59.   2x07: “Lie to Me” – 87/100. 60.   1x12: “Prophecy Girl” – 86/100. 61.   7x18: “Dirty Girls” – 86/100. 62.   6x02: “Bargaining, pt. 02” – 86/100. 63.   4x19: “New Moon Rising” – 86/100. 64.   5x10: “Into the Woods” – 86/100. 65.   3x20: “The Prom” – 85/100. 66.   1x07: “Angel” – 85/100. 67.   4x03: “The Harsh Light of Day” – 85/100. 68.   7x09: “Never Leave Me” – 85/100. 69.   5x03: “The Replacement” – 85/100. 70.   2x15: “Phases” – 85/100.

B [80-84]

71.   4x21: “Primeval” – 84/100. 72.   5x01: “Buffy vs. Dracula” – 84/100. 73.   2x10: “What’s My Line? pt. 02” – 84/100. 74.   4x06: “Wild at Heart” – 84/100. 75.   5x14: “Crush” – 84/100. 76.   7x08: “Sleeper” – 84/100. 77.   6x05: “Life Serial” – 83/100. 78.   1x01: “Welcome to the Hellmouth” – 83/100. 79.   7x02: “Beneath You” – 82/100. 80.   4x01: “The Freshman” – 82/100. 81.   7x10: “Bring on the Night” – 82/100. 82.   4x13: “The I in Team” – 82/100. 83.   3x10: “Amends” – 81/100. 84.   7x01: “Lessons” – 81/100. 85.   3x01: “Anne” – 80/100. 86.   7x14: “First Date” – 80/100. 87.   5x08: “Shadow” – 80/100. 88.   7x03: “Same Time, Same Place” – 80/100. 89.   4x07: “The Initiative” – 80/100.

B- [75-79]

90.   6x16: “Hell’s Bells” – 79/100. 91.   3x13: “The Zeppo” – 79/100. 92.   5x15: “I Was Made to Love You” – 79/100. 93.   2x09: “What’s My Line? pt. 01” – 79/100. 94.   5x20: “Spiral” – 78/100. 95.   3x05: “Homecoming” – 78/100. 96.   5x04: “Out of My Mind” – 78/100. 97.   1x11: “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” – 78/100. 98.   5x06: “Family” – 77/100. 99.   7x04: “Help” – 77/100. 100. 1x05: “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date” – 77/100. 101. 6x04: “Flooded” – 77/100. 102. 3x14: “Bad Girls” – 76/100. 103. 5x09: “Listening to Fear” – 76/100. 104. 2x08: “The Dark Age” – 76/100. 105. 4x12: “A New Man” – 76/100. 106. 7x21: “End of Days” – 75/100. 107. 7x12: “Potential” – 75/100. 108. 5x02: “Real Me” – 75/100. 109. 2x16: “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” – 75/100. 110. 3x04: “The Beauty and the Beasts” – 75/100.

C+ [70-74]

111. 2x18: “Killed by Death” – 74/100. 112. 1x03: “Witch” – 74/100. 113. 6x06: “All the Way” – 74/100. 114. 6x15: “As You Were” – 73/100. 115. 4x14: “Goodbye Iowa” – 73/100. 116. 3x17: “Enemies” – 72/100. 117. 5x11: “Triangle” – 72/100. 118. 1x10: “Nightmares” – 72/100. 119. 6x14: “Older and Far Away” – 72/100. 120. 7x06: “Him” – 71/100. 121. 2x11: “Ted” – 71/100. 122. 6x11: “Gone” – 71/100. 123. 7x19: “Empty Places” – 70/100. 124. 3x11: “Gingerbread” – 70/100. 125. 4x02: “Living Conditions” – 70/100.

C [65-69]

126. 7x11: “Showtime” – 69/100. 127. 2x12: “Bad Eggs” – 69/100. 128. 4x17: “Superstar” – 68/100. 129. 2x02: “Some Assembly Required” – 67/100. 130. 6x10: “Wrecked” – 67/100. 131. 1x02: “The Harvest” – 66/100. 132. 6x12: “The Doublemeat Palace” – 66/100. 133. 3x02: “Dead Men’s Party” – 65/100.

C- [60-64]

134. 4x11: “Doomed” – 64/100. 135. 2x04: “Inca Mummy Girl” – 64/100. 136. 2x05: “Reptile Boy” – 62/100.

D [50-60]

137. 2x20: “Go Fish” – 59/100. 138. 7x13: “The Killer in Me” – 56/100. 139. 1x09: “The Puppet Show” – 55/100. 140. 4x05: “Beer Bad” – 53/100. 141. 1x06: “The Pack” – 51/100.

F [<50]

142. 1x08: “I, Robot… you, Jane” – 47/100. 143. 1x04: “Teacher’s Pet” – 39/100. 144. 4x18: “Where the Wild Things Are” – 35/100.

[itsdanystormborn]

Orient 2 Full Translation.

Orient 2 Spoilers

This is only a fan translation. Don’t forget to support the official releases of Orient, Shinobu Ohtaka and Weekly shounen magazine.

►[Please don’t repost without giving credits. If you use this translation, don’t forget to share the link to this post!]◄

Thank you to @midenm for the preliminary info. You can find the scans in @soreita‘s blog!

Orient 2 : “Malevolent God”

Color Page

The 2nd of this new series! with 50 pages that include color pages!

In the next page there is a  special feature article which consists on a fully detailed explanation about the world of “Orient” 

Story 2: “The malevolent Gods” 

  Turn the world upside down !!

Page 79

Check the 2 previous color pages first!!

----

Textbox:

9 years ago. Tatsuyama town.

----

  ----

TN: This is a flashback to Kojiro’s past. It shows us a scene that took placec at School.A little boy is being scolded by a teacher because he forgot his homework.

----

Sensei: Very bad, Gorou-kun! You forgot your homework! didn’t you?

Gorou: I’m sorry, Sensei!

 Sensei: Go stand in the hallway. You will receive the “Samurai penalty” as punishment!!

 ---

TN: Gorou stands in the hallway with a katana hanging off his neck and an apron that has “bushi” (Samurai) written over it”

---

.

Gorou: I’m so embarrassed…

Girl: Ew! He’s wearing a Kanata just like the “Samurai”

Boy: HIHIHI!, he is!

 ----

TN: Kids start looking towards Kojirou while they gossip (SFX: chira chira) Kojirou is on his seat, with a real katana chained around his body. What are you doing to my bby you monsters…

----

 Sensei: All right everyone, don’t look towards Kojiro! It’s time we resume the class! Open your books from the chapter about “*Oda Nobunaga’s misdeeds” ….

---

TN: (*Oda Nobunaga is a famous daimyou from the Sengoku era. Please read about him!)

---

   Page 80

---

TN: Kids keep looking at Kojirou and making fun of him, while he’s looking upset on his seat. He holds the Katana with one hand, while he writes with the other and tries not to look up.

---

 Kanemaki Kojirou (6)

 ---

TN: Later, at Kojirou’s house. Kojirou is in the garden, and he’s very upset; he throws the Katana to the ground ( it’s still chained to his body) and then he sits next to it, hiding his face in his arms.

---

Kojirou: This damn thing !!!       (TN: The kanji is that from “Katana” but the furigana says ”thing”)

Kojirou: I don’t wanna wear the stupid Katana anymore! Why did I have to come from a “Samurai household” ….?                                                                              

 ---

TN: Someone calls Kojirou…

---

Person: Kojirou

   Page 81

---

TN: Kojirou’s dad!! He’s so cute!! Pretty eyebrows and cool scar on his face. He has his Kanata chained around his body too. 

He gets closer to Kojirou ( who is crying.. ) and tries to calm him down caressing his head.

---

 *Kanemaki Jisai. Kojirou’s Father                      

(TN: *Kanemaki Jisai is the name of a real person, please read about him)

 Jisai: Come here…. I’ll tell you a secret story.

Kojirou: Father…

  ---

TN: Inside their house, they sit facing each other

---

Jisai: You see…

The “Demons” are monsters. They are not guardian gods at all.

The only warriors who fight them are the “Samurai”

 Kojirou: “Samurai” …

 Jisai: That’s right… They are *our ancestors.                        (TN: “yours and mine”)

---

TN: But Kojirou doesn’t look convinced by these words.

---

 Kojirou: ….

Jisai: ….

  Page 82

Jisai: Kojirou… I know what kind of disgusted looks you receive every day in town…

All because you have inherited my blood….    (TN: because you are my successor)

 Jisai: … I’m sorry.

 Kojirou: ….. …..

Kojirou: Don’t say that, Father…

 Jisai: But I want you to know this…  While the adults of this country abandoned their pride and gave up on fighting against the “Demons” …

Jisai: The “Samurai” are the only ones who continue fighting in order to restore the human world….

 Jisai: Kojirou…..

You are not scum.

 Jisai: You are the descendant of a *brave and highly proud household.

Please don’t forget that.                  (*TN: Brave/Heroic)

 Kojirou: …. ….

Kojirou: Yes Father….

 ---

TN: And then, Jisai takes the Katana that’s chained around Kojirou.

---

Jisai: And about that….

Kojiro: ?

  Page 83

---

TN: Jisai pridefully holds the Katana in fron of him while he speaks to Kojiro

---

 Jisai: A Katana is a Samurai’s “pride” itself.

Jisai: Don’t lose it!　　　

 ---

TN: And then, Jisai hands the katana back to Kojiro, who accepts it with tears in his eyes. 

---

 Kojirou’s thoughts: A katana is a Samurai’s pride…

Kojirou’s thoughts: …. Is that how it is?

  ---

TN: Then, someone interrupts the scene… I wonder who that might be? ;D

---

 Musashi: Hey Kojirou! Let’s do some *fencing training!!

 ---

TN: Kojirou looks at Musashi while he tries to hide his tears, cleaning them with his hands. then he starts scolding him for just barging in. Jisai looks very amused!

*Fencing/Swordsmanship

---

  Page 84

Kojirou:  I’ve told you not to barge in so rudely!

Jisai: HAHAHA! It looks like you’ve recently made a fencing friend !

Kojirou: He’s such a weird guy…

Jisai: What did you tell me his name was?

 Kojirou: … … ….

“Musashi”

  ---

TN: This scene throws us back to the present!  The people are really scared of the Oni ( Oni chase them), Musashi is slicing some more Oni in half. Then he jumps on Kojirou’s motorcycle. 

---

Page 85

Musashi: Take this!!!

 ---

TN: They run over some Oni and people run away from the mess

---

 People: Uahh!

 Officer: Our lord, the *God demon, has arrived! Retreat for now!

(TN:Kishin)

   Page 86 

---

TN: Musashi and Kojirou ride in the motorcycle towards the Kishin. there’s some more oni in their way. Ohhh they are gonna get slain!

---

Text box: 151# kiho school year. Tatsuyama’s mine prospective employees. Entrance ceremony.   (TN: Kiho *demon support/ demon protect)

   Kojirou: I’m surprised nonetheless!

Musashi: About what, Kojirou!?

Page 87

Kojirou: About the fact that “Demons” were truly monsters! I reached the point where I trusted in the town’s common sense.

Kanemaki Kojirou (15)

Kojirou: They say “Demons are guardian gods”!

Musashi: I’ve believed in your dad’s story all along! He said that “Demons are scoundrel, Samurai are heroes”!!

Musashi (15)

Musashi: I’m so excited!! Now we’ll finally be able to fulfill that vow we made 5 years ago!!

 Flashback: When we become adults, let’s become “Samurai”. We’ll form a “*Samurai group” and start a journey to exterminate the demons!

---

TN: *bushidan.

TN: Kojirou doesn’t look so sure..

---

 Kojirou: …..

Kojirou: Yeah..

 Musashi: We’ll make a name for ourselves in this world with nothing less than our own swords!!

Kojirou: hmm…

So, about being a “Samurai”….

 Musashi: “hmm… So about being a Samurai”!? What’s wrong, Kojirou?

Page 88

 Kojirou: Well…..

Kojirou: To put it frankly….

  Kojirou:  I don’t care….

Kojirou: About becoming a “Samurai”

 Musashi: …..

Musashi: Huh?

 Musashi: Why are you saying this, Kojirou!?

Weren’t you excited too just a moment ago!?

 Kojirou: Well, I let myself be carried away in the moment and I ended up saying “Yeah”!

Kojirou: If I think about it well… I’ve thought about wanting to leave this town all along, but…

Kojirou: I’ve forgotten how it felt…. Wanting to become a “Samurai” and exterminate the “Demons” …

  Page 89

Musashi: ….

Kojirou: Even if I say “The Samurai” are heroes, I don’t find the idea very appealing.  ( TN: “it doesn’t hit home”)

Kojirou: Not even finding success in the world with the katana does…

Kojirou: A Katana is not such a great thing….

Musashi: ….

Musashi: Kojirou…

 ---

TN: Musashi looks at Kojirou, like waiting for him to say something or understand what he means

---

Musashi: ….

Kojirou:….

 ---

TN: They look at each other

---

 Musashi: Hu-huh?

 Kojirou: Wha- What’s with that face?

Musashi: Anyway, we’re already at the summit of the mountain, so let’s beat that “*God demon”  (TN:* Kishin)

Kojirou: Did you even listen to what I just said?

   Page 90

 Kojirou: I said that I don’t care about being a “Samurai” or about the “Demons” anymore!!!

Musashi: It’s all right.

Kojirou: Because you’ll definitely get it when you do it.

Koujiro’s thoughts: I’ll get what?

Koujiro’s thoughts: Why is this guy being so pushy?

 ---

TN: they reach the summit and…. Is that a chicken-like demon or what? xD

---

 Kishin: HOO.!

  Page 91

Musashi: Is this thing a “God demon”!?

The “chief” of the demons can’t be this little thing!!

 Kojirou: Don’t let your guard down!

Musashi: I know!

 ---

TN: So, Musashi cuts the chicken kishin  in half

---

  Page 92

Kojirou: Are you done? Then, let’s leave town right away….

Musashi: Noo! It’s not dead yet!!

 ---

TN: It’s mutating!

---

Page 93

Musashi:  It revived!?  What do we have to do to beat a “God demon”?

---

TN: Officers come in with a lot of metal to feed the kishin. Carriage says “offerings”

---

 Officers:  Our Lord, God Demon!!

Musashi&Kojirou: ..!?

Officer: Please enjoy these metals that we present you as an offer!

---

TN: The chicken kishin  eats the metal. And Kojirou points at something

---

  Musashi: What’s that? That thing is eating the metal….

Kojirou: LOOK!!

 Page 94 and 95

---

TN: …. HOLY KISHIN!  the chicken demon evolved into…. A super thing!

---

Musashi& Kojiro: A… AHH…!!!

  Page 96&97

Page 98

KISHIN (God Demon) “ENGOKUTENGU” (TN: Which would be something like “hellfire goblin”)

Musashi&Kojirou: It’s… It’s huge!!!

  Page 99

---

TN: So, the thing crushes its foot on the ground and everything flies away. It does crazy and starts to destroy everything. Miners run away from the mess

---

  Page 100

 White hair boy: Wha….

Dark hair boy: Wha…

White hair boy: What is this monster!!?

  Page 101

Miners: Hii…

Lord, God Demon… Please calm down...

 Officer: Oh! Lord, God Demon… After 5 years you’ve revealed us your true form...!!

---

TN: Meanwhile Musashi is unconscious on the floor from when the Kishin went crazy and started to destroy everything, and Kojirou has to face this by himself. He stands up, supporting himself with his katana.

---

Kojirou: T….

This….

  Page 102

Kojirou:  Is this… a “God Demon”?!!

 Kojirou’s thoughts: It’s too big, fighting him is out of question! Either way, better to retreat for now.

---

TN: But Kojiro realizes Musashi is still unconscious. Then he looks back at the kishin and holds his katana in position.

---

 Kojiro: Musashi….

 ---

TN: But the kishin is standing right in front of them! He opens his mouth ready to… eat them?

---

Kojirou: will we be eaten!?

  Page 103

 ---

TN: But the kishin takes him by the katana, with his claws!!! And slowly lifts him.

---

Kojirou: !? This thing wants my Katana!?

 Some guy: IDIOT! The katana is made of metal too, so he’ll eat it! Throw away that Kanata as fast as you can!!

 Kojirou’s thougths: Did he say I should throw away…..

Kojirou’s thougths:  My katana…?

 ---

  Page 104

---

 TN: BUT instead of doing that, Kojiro tries to free himself and his katana of the kishin’s gold, pulling it towards himself with strength!

---

The guy from before: huh!?

Same guy: That guy…

Why is that katana so important to him!?

 Another guy next to him:  who knows… I can’t understand what this Samurai guy is thinking!

 ---

TN: Meanwhile. With Musashi and the 2 boys that I wish had a name so I could stop writing dark and white hair every time….

---

Both boys: Are you all right? Musashi!?

Musashi: *looks up*   Ko.. Kojirou…

  Page 105

---

TN: Musashi looks at Kojirou struggling to free his katana out of the kishin’s hold!. Meanwhile, Kojirou has an internal monologue.

---

Kojirou: Throw away my katana….!?

Certainly… It’s this thing’s fault that I’ve received disgusted looks since long ago…!!

 Flashback:

Officer: Aki’s military laws, article 9, clause 3!

In order to identificate them, the people who belong to “Samurai households”, will be forced to carry their katana!

(TN: “Akishohatto”. Aki: Hiroshima’s former name and the rest “shohatto” makes reference to “bukeshohato” which are a series of laws/ regulations for warrior (samurai) households)

Officer:  “Samurai households” Are the great sinners of the Sengoku era.

Girl: really!

  Page 106

More flashbacks: TN: People gossip about Kojirou.

People: A child of a “Samurai household”…

People: A “Samurai” household offspring!

 Kojirou’s thoughts: Even so…

Kojirou’s thougths: This is my father’s keepsake.

Kojirou’s thoughts: this Katana is with me in every single one of my happy memories…

--- Flashbacks: Jisai watching Musashi and Kojirou play

Musashi: Kojirou! Let’s do some fencing training!

Kojirou: Father! Today I did 100 practice swings and 100 counterattacks!

Musashi: I did 10 more than him!

Kojirou: And then, I did 10 more than him!!

  Page 107

More flashbacks: Kojirou and Jisai training.

Kojirou: 1!, 2!, 3!, 4!

Kojirou: Father… Why when I swing the katana, I feel like clinging tightly to it?

Jisai: That’s due to the “Samurai” warrior blood that flows through your body…

  Page 108

Kojirou: Even if I lose this… I won’t die.

But, I feel like i’ll end up loosing something too precious to me...!!

 Flashback- Jisai: “A Katana is a Samurai’s pride itself, don’t lose it!”

Kojirou: That’s why…

I’ll never let it go!!!

  Page 109:

Kojirou: Give it back…

  Page 110:

 Kojirou: It’s mine…!

--

TN: But the kishin is finally able to take the katana off kojiro’s hands and it’s about to eat it!

--

Page 111

--

TN: And the kishin eats it…

--

People: …. ….

Guy: Oh boy! He ate it…

White hair boy: well…  Never mind! To lose 1 Katana or 2 it’s nothing…

Kojirou: …..

  --

TN: But Kojirou is in despair ☹

--

 Kojirou: Damn it…!

Page 112

 --

TN: But then, Musashi runs towards the kishin with the pickaxe katana ready to attack.

--

 White hair boy: Musashi!? What is that guy planning to do!?

Dark Hair boy: He’s trying to take that “God Demon” by himself!? There’s no way he can match it, he’ll die!!

Page 113

--

TN: Musashi climbs the kishin. Stands on its… stomach?

---

Musashi: It’s here inside, huh?

 White hair boy: He’s standing over the God Demon’s stomach…!?

Kojirou: !

Kojirou:  No way he’ll….

  Page 144

--

TN: Musashi does his move…

---

  Page 115

--

TN: The kishin tries to fight back.. but Musashi avoids the hit on time.

---

  Officer: HAHAHA!! It’s heaven’s punishment! That’s what you get for annoying our lord, the God Demon, while he eats his meal!

Musashi: … “Our lord, The God Demon”, huh ?

Musashi: … That Katana belongs to Kojirou…!

  Page 116

Musashi: watch me smash your dirty guts!!!

  Page 117

--

TN: Wow... he landed a big hit, the stomach sort of cracks…! Kojirou is shook too haha. The kishin screams!

---

White hair boy:  Is the “God Demon” screaming!?

Kojirou: …. Musashi …

  Page 118

--

TN: Musashi keeps landing blows on the kishin’s stomach.

---

Officer:  What should we do? This is becoming dangerous for our lord, the God Demon!!

Officer 2: It’s all right, there’s no way that guy has the strength to break him by himself!

--

TN: Then the kishin gets really mad and tries to smash Musashi. But he ends up punching himself xD

---

Officer: Oh… Our lord, God Demon, you must calm down your anger…. You are punching your own body..!!!

  Page 119

--

TN: Musashi keeps hitting until its stomach breaks. Ew… guts! Musashi goes to take a swim inside the kishin’s gusts and his friends get worried.

---

White&dark hair boy: Musashi!!!

White hair boy: is… Is he dead…!!?

Kojirou: Musashi…

--

TN: But then there’s a little movement among the liquid insides of the kishin.

---

  Page 120&121

 --

TN: Musashi lives and he has Kojirou’s katana!

---

  Page 122

--

TN: RIP Kishin. Musashi walks towards his friends with the katana in hand. Then he stands in front of Kojirou.

---

Kojirou: ….

Musashi: Here

Musashi: You dropped this!

 --

TN: Then he hands it to Kojirou, who gets sentimental.

---

 Kojirou: …

  Page 123

Kojirou: Tha- Thank you

Kojirou:  This is…. super important …

Musashi: I know! It’s something precious to you!

Musashi: Don’t lose it!

 --

TN: So… right in the kokoro? Musashi repeats Jisai’s words from the past…

---

Kojirou: !!

Kojirou: ah!!

 Flashback- Jisai: Kojirou…

You are not scum

You are the descendant of a brave and highly proud family.

And, about this…

  Page 124

Flashback- Jisai: A Katana is a Samurai’s “pride” itself…. Don’t lose it!

 Kojirou: …!

 Flashback: Jisai&Kojirou

Kojirou: Father… Why when I swing the katana, I feel like clinging tightly to it?

Jisai: That’s due to the “Samurai “warrior blood that flows through your body…

  Kojirou’s thoughs: I see…!

Kojirou’s thoughts:  My precious possession… Since I was born I’ve had this proud feeling

This is something I don’t want to lose!

I didn’t notice it myself but…

 Flashback to the beginning of the chap: Musashi&Kojirou

Kojirou: I said I don’t care about being a “Samurai” anymore!

Musashi: It’s all right! You’ll definitely get it when you do it!

  Page 125

 Kojirou’s thoughts: This guy knew, huh….

 Musashi: Phew, I’m so glad!

  Page 126

--

TN: Dead kishin lies dead there…

---

 Musashi:  This guy’s…. not moving huh…. It means we won!?

Kojirou:  Let’s get out of this town before we get into trouble….

 Musashi:  Yeah! By the way, what is this weird horse-like thing!?

 Kojirou: No idea! It was my father’s…. I wonder what could it be?

--

TN: OHHHH YES! In that moment, more “weird horses” ( lol) approach the scene! It’s seems like a bushidan ( samurai group) will make their entrance!  

---

 Narration: A warrior group riding metal horses approaches! The rebelion is unavoidable!!

Continues on next issue: “ Bushidan ( Samurai group) raid”

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Thanks for reading!

[justalittlebitlovely]

3,4,11,20,27,30,38,42,44,50,52,57,65,66 👀,72,77,78,80,83,86,90,94,95,96,99,100,102,118,119,120,123,124,135,138,140,143,147,161,165,166,167,169,174,182,183,186,193,194,200

tino why did you pick s o MANY

3. Do you have any allergies? 

yeah technically I’m allergic to like, pollen, but it doesn’t affect me soooo

4. What is the longest your hair has ever been? 

probably…. as long as it is now???

11. What foreign country would you most like to visit and why? 

tbh I want to go RIGHT BACK to the parts of France that I went my freshman year….. Bring Me Back to Nice!!! Bring Me Back to Avignon!!!! why?? because I miss it THAT’S WHY

20. What is your go-to Starbucks drink? 

white chocolate mocha! slurp

27. Favorite song to sing in the shower? 

any of mine, and it depends on the day

30. Any styles of music you do not like? 

country music, especially pop country….Get That Outta Here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

38. What is the heaviest you have ever weighed? 

hhhhhhhhhhh 130, which is how much I weighed when I got home this summer

42. Favorite non-chocolate candy? 

Every Candy. chomp

44. If you could have one superpower, which one would you most like to have?

oof it’s hard for me to pick between flight & invisibility

50. Do you drink soda? If so, which one is your favorite? 

not much b/c I don’t tolerate it well lmao *looks at the coke I just downed* yeah. usually root beer is my favorite

52. Spring or autumn?

can I choose both? both. they’re my favorite seasons.

57. Last musical artist you saw live?

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh well as a music major I go to like Every Music Performance on campus so it was probably someone doing jazz??? but other than campus things it was probably…oh jeez, back when I saw P!ATD two years ago….take me back to that night goddamn

65. Have you ever been in the audience for the taping of a TV show?

no lmao

66. How long was your longest relationship? Are you still with that person?

TINO YOU’RE JUST ASKING THIS BECAUSE YOU KNOW IT’S YOU (11 months and yes)

72. Real or fake Christmas trees?

REAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i love pine trees

77. Have you ever broken any bones?

nope!!! *knocks on wood*

78. Have you ever gotten any stitches?

I don’t think so?? other than like….when I got my wisdom teeth out

80. What is the oldest piece of clothing you still wear and how old is it?

DAMNED if I know lmao most of my clothes are new since I’ve been revamping my wardrobe

83. From 1-10, how competitive are you?

ooooh that depends on the situation. if I’m good at something I’ll be hella competitive

86. Phrase you say the most?

it honestly changes so much. whatever Relatable Meme I’ve latched onto at the moment probably

90. Have you ever been a Boy/Girl Scout?

I was a girl scout actually hhhhhh when I was a kid

94. Worst habit?

always assuming the worst!!! assuming people will leave me!!! procrastination!!!   

95. Deepest fear?

again with the “assuming people will leave me!!!!” abandonment, isolation

96. Do you believe in ghosts?

at least a little bit!! I like spooky stuff……from a distance

99. Favorite costume you wore for Halloween? How old were you?

oh uhhhhhhhh my old friends and I dressed up as the teenage mutant ninja turtles during uhhh I think our sophomore or junior year of high school? I was Donatello :)

100. Favorite store to shop at?

I don’t KNOW I like clothes shopping

102. Favorite Pokémon?

VULPIX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

118. Favorite fandom?

lmaooooooo hell if I know!!!! this question is weird bc I don’t know if it’s referring to the content itself or like…. the actual fandom. 

119. Oldest memory?

once my twin brother and I drew all over each other with markers and hid from our parents >:)

120. Have you ever snorted when you laughed?

probably???

123. Random boy’s name.

Remus (I’ve got Lupin on the brain)

124. Random girls’ name. 

Sasha (it’s bc of your dog, tino)

135. Describe your sense of humor.

I don’t even know how dhsoifhsfs memes and stupid shit and puns & stuff that really shouldn’t be funny but is??

138. Name a moment in your life when you were pleasantly surprised.

oh!!! my senior year of high school I had a really nice solo in our show choir show (it was a duet technically but I had a little solo part at the beginning of it) and at one of the competitions I was rewarded best female soloist out of everyone :’’’’) I was so shocked & happy

140. Have you ever left a movie theater before the movie was done?

I don’t think so???

143. Have you ever gotten a song you dislike stuck in your head?

who hasn’t hdosfhsofs

147. Where on your body are you the most ticklish?

I don’t know :’)

161. Do you like horror movies?

ehhhhh I don’t think I’ve really seen any actually scary ones. like…. I’ve seen two but they weren’t scary?? I don’t think I’d mind horror movies as long as they’re not ones that focus on jumpscares b/c eeeeeeeeee jumpscares & anxiety do not mix

165. Name one item from your bucket list.

I want…. to sing to a stadium of people & have them all singing along to a song I wrote :’) the dream

166. From 1-10, how much do you like children?

….eh….. 3 or 4, maybe

167. Have you ever thought about your wedding?

honestly I’m probably one of the only people on the planet who hasn’t, ever??? which is super weird b/c I’m such a hopeless romantic??? idk man

169. Favorite flower? 

I love daisies!!! but I love any flower tbh

174. What was your favorite toy to play with when you were a child?

I had two beanie babies, cat & lamb, and they were my first two imaginary friends too :’)

182. Do you like karaoke?

I’ve only done it like…..twice, and it was alone so it was kinda sad lol

183. Have you ever written a love letter?

honestly? probably lmaoooo

186. Any guilty pleasures?

does reading fic at 3am count

193. Were you voted a “best” or “most likely to” in high school?

I was actually!!! Me and one of my old friends (who was also the guy I had the show choir duet with, hah) were both voted “most likely to become famous”!!! guess I was known for my voice after all :’) (he’s an amazing artist. seriously. what the FUCK)

194. Have you ever gotten detention? 

nah I’m an angel :)

200. How long have you been on tumblr?

hhhh I joined the day before my junior prom, so…. about 3 years? (I also went to prom that year with the same old friend that I had that duet with, hah. I still have the poster he made me :’) anh, if you’re out there,,,,)

god dammit tino. god fuckin dammit. are you happy???

[the-most-beautiful-broom]

100 questions

it’s long so it’s under the cut, but man was this fun. thanks for the tag @she-who-the-river-could-not-hold ♥ i’ll tag my loves (if you want to haha this is a lot) @dylanobrienisbatman @blueshirtbell @granger--danger @nightbleeder

1. What is your nickname? lol I have so many. Linds is the most common on here though.

2. How old are you? 23

3. What is your birth month? october

4. What is your zodiac sign? libra, but it’s only like 60% accurate imo (I’m not fragile, or a flirt? ya girl can be charismatic, but I don’t think that’s the same?)

5. What is your favorite color? green

6. What’s your lucky number? when I was in high school/sports, I picked 13 for my number because everyone was like oooo it’s unlucky and I was like cool, guess I’ll win while wearing an unlucky number then (and that’s today’s slytherin mood)

7. Do you have any pets? not in the city with me :(

8. Where are you from? california

9. How tall are you? 5’ 9"

10. What shoe size are you? 10

11. How many pairs of shoes do you own? more than I should, probs

12. Are you random? oh goodness no. I believe in patterns and I’m pretty dang predictable.

13. Last person you texted? my sister

14. Are you psychic in any way? lol no

15. Last TV show watched? queer eye again

16. Favorite movie? IMPOSSIBLE <--stealing Kath’s answer on this one

17. Favorite show from your childhood? sooooo we didn’t have a tv haha my mom really really wanted her daughters to be well read

18. Do you want children? I want to foster!

19. Do you want a church wedding? I’m not sure? i’d want everyone to be comfortable and they might not be in a church…I do know that I want a brunch wedding though, bc dancing isn’t my thing and breakfast food is

20. What is your religion? I’m Christian! Seventh-day Adventist is the specific denomination, but nobody ever really knows what to do with that haha

21. Have you ever been to the hospital? not for me/like I’m sick, but for other people, yeah, too much

22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law? Lol not at all. I’ve gotten pulled over four times, but never ticketed though.

23. How is life? better than I deserve

24. Baths or showers? showers

25. What color socks are you wearing? i’m wearing heels for work, so no socks

26. Have you ever been famous? goodness no, whatever for?

27. Would you like to be a big celebrity? I think I would, to get to have that platform to make a change and give other people a voice would be awesome

28. What type of music do you like? something with words that mean something, or a melody that surprises you. I’m so weak for key changes though…I’ve always said that my perfect music is driving music: I can belt it alone on a highway at 3am, or laugh over it with friends in the afternoon.

29. Have you ever been skinny dipping? nope

30. How many pillows do you sleep with? two

31. What position do you usually sleep in? on my right side, with my hands under my pillow

32. How big is your house? it’s a nyc apartment, fam, it’s the size of a broom closet. it’s cozy though, and I love it

33. What do you typically have for breakfast? I’m so bad at eating breakfast…if I do get something, it’s at the bagel place across the street from my office

34. Have you ever left the country? ages ago

35. Have you ever tried archery? on retreats/for school; I wanted to be like robin hood

36. Do you like anyone? I might have a bit of a crush at the moment and it is stressing me out

37. Favorite swear word? so I literally never swear irl, and the first time I swore online was when I was writing my stranger things fic—it’s literally impossible to write dustin and steve and have them not cuss?? ummm I don’t know, they all have their purposes, but I think fuck is just next level emphatic. it’s crazy that it’s just a word, but it conveys so much when you use it

38. When do you fall asleep? if/when I establish a normal sleeping schedule, I’ll let you know

39. Do you have any scars? in the middle of one of my eyebrows, from when I cracked my head open as a kid, which is why I always fill my eyebrows in. also acne scars, which I’m working on not caring about.

40. Sexual orientation? straight

41. Are you a good liar? yes

42. What languages would you like to learn? Literally all of them, so many. I’d love to learn Tagalog so I could have that connection with my mom’s side of the family, and then Spanish is just so beautiful and I really should’ve kept up with it after high school. French and German and Italian would be nice too, and then maybe an ancient language or three?  

43. Top 10 songs? REFUSING TO ANSWER THIS <--again, stealing kath’s answer. y’all know how much music I listen to and cry over, so you know I can’t do this

44. Do you like your country? yes but not my leadership. I love the people of this country and I hate that the voices of the few are the ones that are loudest and that are yelling and that are deciding. the people of my country aren’t being represented or heard or protected and it breaks my heart.

45. Do you have friends from the web? I do! from this blog and I ran a fashion blog for a while, so from insta too

46. What is your personality type? MBTI: estj, enneagram: 2w3.

47. Hogwarts House? slytherin (as if anyone couldn’t tell)

48. Can you curl your tongue? no

49. Pick one fictional character you can relate to? emma woodhouse (I wish I could say lizzie bennet, but it’s got to be emma)

50. Left or right handed? right

51. Are you scared of spiders? not really? my sister is, so I always had to kill them

52. Favorite food? bread

53. Favorite foreign food? mexican (one of the perks of growing up near the border)

54. Are you a clean or messy person? I’m an orderly person…but sometimes that manifests itself in organized chaos BUT I KNOW WHERE EVERYTHING IS OKAY

55. If you could switch your gender for a day, what would you do? call out my coworkers and not be written off as emotional/sensitive

56. What color underwear? black

57. How long does it take for you to get ready? most days like 20 minutes? from horizontal in bed to out the door...but if i have to do my hair, tap another 3 hours on that, because it has to air dry

58. Do you have much of an ego? so this is complicated because i have high confidence in my capabilities and performance, but struggle with my worth and importance independent of those

59. Do you suck or bite lollipops? I don’t really care for lollipops, they just make me want to brush my teeth

60. Do you talk to yourself? yep

61. Do you sing to yourself? also yep

62. Are you a good singer? oh it’s so relative, fam. I can harmonize pretty well, so I’m a good backup singer

63. Biggest Fears? insignificance

64. Are you a gossip? not really. I hate complaining, and I really hate when other people complain; i’m just like okay so what did you do about it? 

65. Are you a grammar nazi? if someone knows better, in a context when they should know better, then yes. so like, in a paper, for a presentation, yeah. people ask for help bc I’m good at what I do. but also it’s such a construct that we judge people off of, so I work on not doing that outside of a professional/scholarly context? also I’m a big believer in knowing the rules and breaking them to make a point (see: all my lower case answers, run on sentences, etc.)  

66. Do you have long or short hair? I pixie-d my hair back in august and regret it constantly lol. it had to be done though

67. Can you name all 50 states of America? i mean, probably? I’ve been to most of them

68. Favorite school subject? always english

69. Extrovert or Introvert? literally the most extroverted extrovert

70. Have you ever been scuba diving? nope

71. What makes you nervous? when I see kids wandering and their parents not noticing

72. Are you scared of the dark? no

73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes? if we’re alone and I can help them, sure. I despise when people publicly reprimand someone for an unintentional error; it’s just so inconsiderate  

74. Are you ticklish? I find people’s obsession with tickling so weird lol

75. Have you ever started a rumor? no

76. Have you ever been out of your home country? …did we not already do this one?

77. Have you ever drank underage? lol fam I don’t drink at all

78. Have you ever done drugs? no

79. What do you fantasize about? paying off all my student debt, having an apartment in all my favorite cities, being able to travel. being an English professor. sometimes growing old with someone; most of the times being a mentor to younger women/getting to be someone i didn’t have

80. How many piercings do you have? none

81. Can you roll your R’s? yeah

82. How fast can you type? not very, which is funny because I work in IT, but I don’t type with my pinkies so that’s a mess

83. How fast can you run? lol I don’t run

84. What color is your hair? brown

85. What color are your eyes? hazel (green + brown)

86. What are you allergic to? mold and one very specific type of grass

87. Do you keep a journal? no

88. Are you depressed about anything? I disagree with how this question is worded but okay. ummm the fact that all my money goes to student loans and rent? misogyny in the workplace? hypocrisy in my government? the lack of love and empathy expressed by people who profess to be believers in love and empathy? that’s a good start 

89. Do you like your age? it’s where I’m at, either way

90. What makes you angry? willful ignorance

91. Do you like your own name? I do

92. Did you ever get a foreign object up your nose? no

93. Do you want a boy or a girl for a child? not to be a cliché, but all children are gifts? Like I don’t want to physically bear children, but if they’re there, they deserve love (hence the foster thing-- there are SO many kids in a broken system that need security and someone to care for them, and nobody helps them and that just shouldn’t be)

94. What talents do you have? public speaking and writing. I have a passion for making people feel welcomed and known and loved, so I hope that too

95. Sun or moon? sunshine; I’ll always be a SoCal girl at heart

96. How did you get your name? my parent’s loved the meaning

97. Are you religious? I am, yeah. it’s been a journey—other people believing blindy makes me so mad, as well as people who never question their faith or grow in it, or act in a way that shows they don’t actually believe what they say they do—but yeah, my faith is hugely important to me.  

98. Have you ever been to a therapist? I have not, although the farther away I get from some things, the more I think I ought to

99. Color of your bedspread? white with gray tassels

100. Color of your room? white walls and an exposed brick wall

[badmousestuff-blog]

Ben Shapiro’s fatal flaws on Socialism

Or maybe I should call this “Ben Shaprio gets brutally smashed by Marxist Endowment”

Anyway I’ve not really watched much of Ben Shapiro in the past, I’ve never really seen him as that interesting, however when I found numerous videos related to him with pretty childish titles I’d expect from an An-cap, well that intrigued me. But alas I found Ben’s talks and arguments to be dismissive at best, he hounds on through his arguments with such ferocious speed and in such a large dominating presence that its very understandable why many would think he was a genius on the topic, I think even Peterson has taken notes. But the thing is he’s not, he’s a hack who appears from what I’ve seen to know an incredibly minuscule amount about Socialism, so much so I wouldn’t be surprised if he only found out about it by just listening to a few Milton Friedman and Tom Wood’s videos.

First Ben supposes that Socialism at its fundamental is about ‘Equal Distribution or wealth’. I don’t know how much theory he’s read into, it is true that Socialism tends to bring up the topics of Equal Distribution quite a lot, but this is largely an American Simplification (I say American because the two phrases are often interlinked by so many of them). The history of Socialist theory was never based on Government Redistribution, but upon things like Ownership, Control, and Democracy. To put it simply, its about the Pizza base instead of the Toppings, how the structure is fundamentally formed determines how it operates in the world. Thus we are interested in bringing the production into the hands of the people, as opposed to simply redistributing the creations there of. If production serves our interests, we will not see people going without food, going without housing. Right now production serves profit, which is not as reducible as “Anything that benefits you” like some Shapiro types like to state, Profit is specifically financial gain extracted from the surplus labour which workers create. This is the reason we oppose it.



To add to this Ben appears to have some of that good ole American historical revisionism in him, as evidenced by how he states (in regards to Wealth Re-Distribution) “Who told you that you get to tell the universe how wealth is distributed” In this statement he implies one of the most pernicious myths about Capitalism that if you think about it for longer than 10 seconds you should come to realise hasn’t got any value at all - The idea that Capitalism is Natural.
Capitalism is NOT our natural state, it is not the way that human beings operate naturally, it is not ‘voluntary exchange’, it is not ‘the most ethical world view, it was like all other systems before it a force of humanity, the inevitable result of history leading up to that point. Throughout 95% of human history we lived in small hunter gatherer situations, not communism by any means but certainly anything but Capitalism. What little economic exchange there was it was largely on a small scale friendship basis (Internal Debting), not done for the exchange value of goods. If there is any situation humanity is most like, and has inherited the most from, its Primitive Society. 

Capitalism like any system since then did what it could to enforce its rule (Property laws, Enclosure, Conquest, Police, Exploitation etc) it is not an act of nature that we have the arrangement of society in the way it is right now, its a very human product, and so Ben, talking to his crowd like a bunch of toddlers, gets no Recon points from me. Who am I to say how wealth is distributed? The same person who said Private Capitalist ownership should be the way it gets done, thats who. For all of Ben’s moral grandstanding of the ethics of Capitalism, in doing so he ignores all the parameters that were set up for the existence and expansion of the system, all of the blood that was caused in maintaining its existence, all of the bandages it raps around itself to keep itself sustaining just a little bit longer, so much so that it cannot be reduced to a Petty Commodities Trade. He can talk as much as he wants about how you get paid for your labour under Capitalism, yet never acknowledges the amount of surplus labour extracted from the process that is used to profit the Capitalist’s pockets. A certain Yugoslav has a term for this kind of thinking, its called ‘Pure Ideology.’

But then it got me thinking, Ben’s glaring hypocrisies are far from over, like his statements on morality “Its not moral to steal from someone (Socialism) just because enough people vote on the matter” Its hardly anything more than a redundant view on Socialism, but have you noticed the glaring elephant in the room here? Ben is certainly not a Anarcho-Capitalist, he’s just a plain old vanilla Conservative with a loud voice and Gishy Gallop. So if he’s arguing Socialism is theft, why is he not also arguing that Taxation is theft? After all the government gets to take plenty of money off of you and put it into whatever it wants. Hell you don’t even get a vote on that?
But no, he just argues that taxes should be lower, not gotten rid of, he will accept some taxation just not too much, he thereby falls into the common Conservative double-think. “Taxation is theft, except when I want it to be spent on the things I want it too” Get a grip Ben, either be consistent in saying that both taxes and socialism are buggery or don’t. The fact that this double-think is so prevalent in American society just goes to show how much of a grip Capitalist hegemony has.

What’s amused me very much about Ben’s talking points is just how circle jerky they are, they’ve become so ingrained in people’s minds they just take them on word of mouth, so he’s able to make an utter straw man of what we’re about. “Socialists always go around saying Nordic Countries are great” (They’re not Socialist, thats a BernieBro Liberal myth) “They always say thats not TROOOO Socialism”. Well that is somewhat correct, a lot of folks do argue places like USSR, China, and Cuba aren’t/weren’t Socialist, yet what he fails to realise is that just as many would argue the opposite. I am one of them. I know its very comfortable for many of my fellow leftists to argue “No they were State Capitalist/Transitionary/Fascist” but the thing I’ve had to come to realise is that we don’t get to decide exactly how they’ll turn out, many times we have to look at what we’ve got an analyse from there. Taking these’s countries achievements into account there is definitely no argument that without Socialist revolutions they would have been in a hellhole of a state otherwise. China for example could not have developed itself as the new rival to the west without the massive industrialisation brought upon by Mao, Cuba would probably look like Honduras or Haiti today if it had not defended itself and empowered its people. The results I have found to be incredibly impactful on the lives of these nations (with definite consideration to be made to the areas and economic development they are in), and not to be trivialised as simply ‘Social-Democracy on Steroids’. You can even find that given equal degrees of economic development, Socialism provides a higher standard of living in comparison to Capitalism… over 90% of the time.


Nope, I’m serious, check it out. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1646771/pdf/amjph00269-0055.pdf




That all being said I would just like to put this forward to Shapiro, to showcase again his glowing elephants. What would he say if I told him about our current Economic situation? Imperialism in the middle east? High taxes and regulations? Total destruction of the environment? Well I found out what his answer was last December. “Not Capitalism, Corporatism” AHHHHHHH, look at what we have here. In fact he’s wanks off so hard to Capitalism that he doesn’t even accept ‘Crony Capitalism’, to him Corporatism isn’t even CAPITALISM! If you haven’t realised the whole ‘Not True’ argument is going to be dependent upon your worldview of what something is, you will argue that Capitalism is not ‘True’ today because of X number of reasons, but you will always argue that Socialism is just that, pure and simple, no prefixes. Yet they will be thinking the same about you. Do yourself a favour and either take the entire cake of what you support, not just the icing top, or have the common curtesy of acknowledging your opponents will be doing the same as you. Well except for me.

So in conclusion then, all I’ve found from these brazened titled videos the likes of “BEN SHAPIRO SODOMIZES HIS MOTHER” is little more than

- Viewing Capitalism from an Idealistic and Non-Existent POV. - Making simplistic/false claims regarding the nature of Socialism. - An overloading of rapid fire accusations used to pacify the opposition - Making total hypocrisies on his positions

Oh sure he’s charismatic, sure he’s loud and proud, but he’s also obtuse, an opportunist, and using his own language… a false prophet.

[temotekado]

Lưu

Tips to learn a new language

The 75 most common words make up 40% of occurrences
The 200 most common words make up 50% of occurrences
The 524 most common words make up 60% of occurrences
The 1257 most common words make up 70% of occurrences
The 2925 most common words make up 80% of occurrences
The 7444 most common words make up 90% of occurrences
The 13374 most common words make up 95% of occurrences
The 25508 most common words make up 99% of occurrences

(Source: 5 Steps to Speak a New Language by Hung Quang Pham)

This article has an excellent summary on how to rapidly learn a new language within 90 days.

We can begin with studying the first 600 words. Of course chucking is an effective way to memorize words readily. Here’s a list to translate into the language you desire to learn that Derek Roger suggested! :)

EXPRESSIONS OF POLITENESS (about 50 expressions)

‘Yes’ and ‘no’: yes, no, absolutely, no way, exactly.

Question words: when? where? how? how much? how many? why? what? who? which? whose?

Apologizing: excuse me, sorry to interrupt, well now, I’m afraid so, I’m afraid not.

Meeting and parting: good morning, good afternoon, good evening, hello, goodbye, cheers, see you later, pleased to meet you, nice to have met.

Interjections: please, thank you, don’t mention it, sorry, it’ll be done, I agree, congratulations, thank heavens, nonsense.

NOUNS (about 120 words)

Time: morning, afternoon, evening, night; Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; spring, summer, autumn, winter; time, occasion, minute, half-hour, hour, day, week, month, year.

People: family, relative, mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother, husband, wife; colleague, friend, boyfriend, girlfriend; people, person, human being, man, woman, lady, gentleman, boy, girl, child.

Objects: address, bag, book, car, clothes, key, letter (=to post), light (=lamp), money, name, newspaper, pen, pencil, picture, suitcase, thing, ticket.

Places: place, world, country, town, street, road, school, shop, house, apartment, room, ground; Britain, name of the foreign country, British town-names, foreign town-names.

Abstract: accident, beginning, change, color, damage, fun, half, help, joke, journey, language, English, name of the foreign language, letter (of alphabet), life, love, mistake, news, page, pain, part, question, reason, sort, surprise, way (=method), weather, work.

Other: hand, foot, head, eye, mouth, voice; the left, the right; the top, the bottom, the side; air, water, sun, bread, food, paper, noise.

PREPOSITIONS (about 40 words)

General: of, to, at, for, from, in, on.

Logical: about, according-to, except, like, against, with, without, by, despite, instead of.

Space: into, out of, outside, towards, away from, behind, in front of, beside, next to, between, above, on top of, below, under, underneath, near to, a long way from, through.

Time: after, ago, before, during, since, until.

DETERMINERS (about 80 words)

Articles and numbers: a, the; nos. 0–20; nos. 30–100; nos. 200–1000; last, next, 1st–12th.

Demonstrative: this, that.

Possessive: my, your, his, her, its, our, their.

Quantifiers: all, some, no, any, many, much, more, less, a few, several, whole, a little, a lot of.

Comparators: both, neither, each, every, other, another, same, different, such.

ADJECTIVES (about 80 words)

Color: black, blue, green, red, white, yellow.

Evaluative: bad, good, terrible; important, urgent, necessary; possible, impossible; right, wrong, true.

General: big, little, small, heavy; high, low; hot, cold, warm; easy, difficult; cheap, expensive; clean, dirty; beautiful, funny (=comical), funny (=odd), usual, common (=shared), nice, pretty, wonderful; boring, interesting, dangerous, safe; short, tall, long; new, old; calm, clear, dry; fast, slow; finished, free, full, light (=not dark), open, quiet, ready, strong.

Personal: afraid, alone, angry, certain, cheerful, dead, famous, glad, happy, ill, kind, married, pleased, sorry, stupid, surprised, tired, well, worried, young.

VERBS (about 100 words)

arrive, ask, be, be able to, become, begin, believe, borrow, bring, buy, can, change, check, collect, come, continue, cry, do, drop, eat, fall, feel, find, finish, forget, give, going to, have, have to, hear, help, hold, hope, hurt (oneself), hurt (someone else), keep, know, laugh, learn, leave, lend, let (=allow), lie down, like, listen, live (=be alive), live (=reside), look (at), look for, lose, love, make, may (=permission), may (=possibility), mean, meet, must, need, obtain, open, ought to, pay, play, put, read, remember, say, see, sell, send, should, show, shut, sing, sleep, speak, stand, stay, stop, suggest, take, talk, teach, think, travel, try, understand, use, used to, wait for, walk, want, watch, will, work (=operate), work (=toil), worry, would, write.

PRONOUNS (about 40 words)

Personal: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, one; myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves.

Possessive: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs.

Demonstrative: this, that.

Universal: everyone, everybody, everything, each, both, all, one, another.

Indefinite: someone, somebody, something, some, a few, a little, more, less; anyone, anybody, anything, any, either, much, many.

Negative: no-one, nobody, nothing, none, neither.

ADVERBS (about 60 words)

Place: here, there, above, over, below, in front, behind, nearby, a long way away, inside, outside, to the right, to the left, somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, nowhere, home, upstairs, downstairs.

Time: now, soon, immediately, quickly, finally, again, once, for a long time, today, generally, sometimes, always, often, before, after, early, late, never, not yet, still, already, then (=at that time), then (=next), yesterday, tomorrow, tonight.

Quantifiers: a little, about (=approximately), almost, at least, completely, very, enough, exactly, just, not, too much, more, less.

Manner: also, especially, gradually, of course, only, otherwise, perhaps, probably, quite, so, then (=therefore), too (=also), unfortunately, very much, well.

CONJUNCTIONS (about 30 words)

Coordinating: and, but, or; as, than, like.

Time & Place: when, while, before, after, since (=time), until; where.

Manner & Logic: how, why, because, since (=because), although, if; what, who, whom, whose, which, that.

#Suutam

[shirlleycoyle]

The Famous Router Hackers Actually Loved

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

In a world where our routers look more and more like upside-down spiders than things you would like to have in your living room, there are only a handful of routers that may be considered “famous.”

Steve Jobs’ efforts to sell AirPort—most famously by using a hula hoop during a product demo—definitely deserve notice in this category, and the mesh routers made by the Amazon-owned Eero probably fit in this category as well.

But a certain Linksys router, despite being nearly 20 years old at this point, takes the cake—and it’s all because of a feature that initially went undocumented that proved extremely popular with a specific user base.

Let’s spend a moment reflecting on the blue-and-black icon of wireless access, the Linksys WRT54G. This is the wireless router that showed the world what a wireless router could do.

1988

The year that Linksys was formed by Janie and Victor Tsao, two Taiwanese immigrants to the United States who launched their company, initially a consultancy called DEW International, while working information technology jobs. (Victor, fun fact, was an IT manager with Taco Bell.) According to a 2004 profile in Inc., the company started as a way to connect inventors with manufacturers in the Taiwanese market, but the company moved into the hardware business itself in the early 1990s, eventually landing on home networking—a field that, in the early 2000s, Linksys came to dominate.

How black and blue became the unofficial colors of home networking during the early 2000s

Today, buying a router for your home is something that a lot of people don’t think much about. Nowadays, you can buy one for a few dollars used and less than $20 new.

But in the late 1990s, it was a complete nonentity, a market that had not been on the radar of many networking hardware companies, because the need for networking had been limited to the office. Which meant that installing a router was both extremely expensive and beyond the reach of mere mortals.

It’s the kind of situation that helps companies on the periphery, not quite big enough to play with the big fish, but small enough to sense an opportunity. During its first decade of existence, Janie and Victor Tsao took advantage of such opportunities, using market shifts to help better position their networking hardware.

In the early 90s, Linksys hardware had to come with its own drivers. But when Windows 95 came along, networking was built in—and that meant a major barrier for Linksys’ market share suddenly disappeared overnight, which meant there was suddenly a growing demand for its network adapters, which fit inside desktops and laptops alike.

While Victor was helping to lead and handle the technical end, Janie was working out distribution deals with major retailers such as Best Buy, which helped to take the networking cards mainstream in the technology world.

But the real opportunity, the one that made Linksys hard to shake for years afterwards, came when Victor built a router with a home audience in mind. With dial-up modems on their way out, there was a sudden need.

“As home broadband Internet use began to bloom in the late ’90s, at costs significantly higher than those for dial-up connections, Victor realized that people were going to want to hook all their small-office or home computers to one line,” the Inc. profile on Janie and Victor stated. “To do so they would need a router, a high-tech cord splitter allowing multiple computers to hook into one modem.”

The companies Linksys was competing with were, again, focused on a market where routers cost nearly as much as a computer itself. But Victor found the sweet spot: A $199 router that came with software that was easy to set up and reasonably understandable for mere mortals. And it had the distinctive design that Linksys became known for—a mixture of blue and biack plastics, with an array of tiny LED lights on the front.

In a review of the EtherFast Cable/DSL router, PC Magazine noted that Linksys did far more than was asked of it.

“A price of $200 would be a breakthrough for a dual Ethernet port router, but Linksys has packed even more value into the 1.8- by 9.3- by 5.6-inch (HWD) package,” reviewer Craig Ellison wrote. The router, which could handle speeds of up to 100 megabits, sported four ports—and could theoretically handle hundreds of IP addresses.

Perhaps it wasn’t as overwhelmingly reliable as some of its more expensive competitors, but it was reasonably priced for homes, and that made it an attractive proposition.

This router was a smash success, helping to put Linksys on top of a fledgling market with market share that put its competitors to shame. In fact, the only thing that was really wrong about the router was that it did not support wireless. But Linksys’ name recognition meant that when it did, there would be an existing audience that would find its low cost and basic use cases fascinating.

One router in particular proved specifically popular—though not for the reasons Linksys anticipated.

$500M

The amount that Cisco, the networking hardware giant, acquired Linksys for in 2003. The acquisition came at a time when Linksys was making half a billion dollars a year, and was growing fast in large part because of the success of its routers, among other networking equipment. In comments to NetworkWorld, Victor Tsao claimed that there was no overlap between the unmanaged networking of Linksys routers and the managed networking of Cisco’s existing infrastructure. They did things differently—something Cisco would soon find out the hard way.

Not only was the WRT54G cheap, it was hackable. (Jay Gooby/Flickr)

How an accidental feature in Linksys’ wireless router turned a ho-hum router into an enthusiast device

In many ways, the WRT54G router series has become something of the Nintendo Entertainment System of wireless routers. Coming around relatively early in the mainstream history of the wireless router, it showed a flexibility far beyond what its creator intended for the device. While not the only game in town, it was overwhelmingly prevalent in homes around the world.

Although much less heralded, its success was comparable to the then-contemporary Motorola RAZR for a time, in that it was basically everywhere, on shelves in homes and small businesses around the world. The WRT54G, despite the scary name, was the wireless router people who needed a wireless router would buy.

And odds are, it may still be in use in a lot of places, even though its security standards are well past its prime and it looks extremely dated on a mantle. (The story of the Amiga that controlled a school district’s HVAC systems comes to mind.)

But the reason the WRT54G series has held on for so long, despite using a wireless protocol that was effectively made obsolete 12 years ago, might come down to a feature that was initially undocumented—a feature that got through amid all the complications of a big merger. Intentionally or not, the WRT54G was hiding something fundamental on the router’s firmware: Software based on Linux.

This was a problem, because it meant that Linksys would be compelled to release the source code of its wireless firmware under the GNU General Public License, which requires the distribution of the derivative software under the same terms as the software that inspired it.

Andrew Miklas, a contributor on the Linux kernel email list, explained that he had personally reached out to a member of the company’s staff and confirmed that the software was based on Linux … but eventually found his contact had stopped getting back to him.

Miklas noted that his interest in the flashed file was driven in part by a desire to see better Linux support for the still-relatively-new 802.11g standard that the device supported.

“I know that some wireless companies have been hesitant of releasing open source drivers because they are worried their radios might be pushed out of spec,” he wrote. “However, if the drivers are already written, would there be any technical reason why they could not simply be recompiled for Intel hardware, and released as binary-only modules?”

Mikas caught something interesting, but something that shouldn’t have been there. This was an oversight on the part of Cisco, which got an unhappy surprise about a popular product sold by its recent acquisition just months after its release. Essentially, what happened was that one of their suppliers apparently got a hold of Linux-based firmware, used it in the chips supplied to the company by Broadcom, and failed to inform Linksys, which then sold the software off to Cisco.

In a 2005 column for Linux Insider, Heather J. Meeker, a lawyer focused on issues of intellectual property and open-source software, wrote that this would have been a tall order for Cisco to figure out on its own:

The first takeaway from this case is the difficulty of doing enough diligence on software development in an age of vertical disintegration. Cisco knew nothing about the problem, despite presumably having done intellectual property diligence on Linksys before it bought the company. But to confound matters, Linksys probably knew nothing of the problem either, because Linksys has been buying the culprit chipsets from Broadcom, and Broadcom also presumably did not know, because it in turn outsourced the development of the firmware for the chipset to an overseas developer.

To discover the problem, Cisco would have had to do diligence through three levels of product integration, which anyone in the mergers and acquisitions trade can tell you is just about impossible. This was not sloppiness or carelessness—it was opaqueness.

Bruce Perens, a venture capitalist, open-source advocate, and former project leader for the Debian Linux distribution, told LinuxDevices that Cisco wasn’t to blame for what happened, but still faced compliance issues with the open-source license.

“Subcontractors in general are not doing enough to inform clients about their obligations under the GPL,” Perens said. (He added that, despite offering to help Cisco, they were not getting back to him.)

Nonetheless, the info about the router with the open-source firmware was out there, and Mikas’ post quickly gained attention in the enthusiast community. A Slashdot post could already see the possibilities: “This could be interesting: it might provide the possibility of building an uber-cool accesspoint firmware with IPsec and native ipv6 support etc etc, using this information!”

And as Slashdot commentators are known to do, they spoke up.

It clearly wasn’t done with a sense of excitement, but within about a month of the post hitting Slashdot, the company released its open-source firmware.

A WRT54G removed from its case. The device, thanks to its Linux firmware, became the target of both software and hardware hacks. (Felipe Fonesca/Flickr)

To hackers, this opened up a world of opportunity, and third-party developers quickly added capabilities to the original hardware that was never intended. This was essentially a commodity router that could be “hacked” to spit out a more powerful wireless signal at direct odds with the Federal Communications Commission, developed into an SSH server or VPN for your home network, or more colorfully, turned into the brains of a robot.

It also proved the root for some useful open-source firmware in the form of OpenWrt and Tomato, among others, which meant that there was a whole infrastructure to help extend your router beyond what the manufacturer wanted you to do.

Cisco was essentially compelled by the threat of legal action to release the Linux-based firmware under the GPL, but it was not thrilled to see that the device whose success finally gave it the foothold in the home that had long evaded the company being used in ways beyond what the box said.

As Lifehacker put it way back in 2006, it was the perfect way to turn your $60 router into a $600 router, which likely meant it was potentially costing Cisco money to have a device this good on the market.

So as a result, the company “upgraded” the router in a way that was effectively a downgrade, removing the Linux-based firmware, replacing it with a proprietary equivalent, and cutting down the amount of RAM and storage the device used, which made it difficult to replace the firmware with something created by a third party. This angered end users, and Cisco (apparently realizing it had screwed up) eventually released a Linux version of the router, the WRT54GL, which restored the specifications removed.

That’s the model you can still find on Amazon today, and still maintains a support page on Linksys’ website—and despite topping out at just 54 megabits per second through wireless means, a paltry number given what modern routers at the same price point can do, it’s still on sale.

The whole mess about the GPL came to bite in the years after the firmware oversight was first discovered—Cisco eventually paid a settlement to the Free Software Foundation—but it actually informed Linksys’ brand. Today, the company sells an entire line of black-and-blue routers that maintain support for open-source firmware. (They cost way more than the WRT54G ever did, though.)

“We want this book to expand the audience of the WRT54G platform, and embedded device usage as a whole, unlocking the potential that this platform has to offer.”

— A passage from the introduction of the 2007 book Linksys WRT54G Ultimate Hacking, a book that played into the fact that the WRT54G was a hackable embedded system that was fully mainstream and could be used in numerous ways—both for fun and practical use cases. Yes, hacking this device became so common that there is an entire 400-page book dedicated to the concept.

Now, to be clear, most people who bought a variant of the WRT54G at Best Buy likely did not care that the firmware was open source. But the decision created a cult of sorts around the device by making it hackable and able to do more things than the box on its own might have suggested. And that cult audience helped to drive longstanding interest in the device well beyond its hacker roots.

It was an unintentional word-of-mouth play, almost. When the average person asked their tech-savvy friend, “what router should I buy,” guess which one they brought up.

You know something has become a legendary hacking target when there’s a book about it. (via Bookshop)

A 2016 Ars Technica piece revealed the router, at the time, was still making millions of dollars a year for Linksys, which by that time had been sold to Belkin. Despite being nowhere near as powerful as more expensive options, the WRT54GL—yes, specifically the one with Linux—retained an audience well into its second decade because it was perceived as being extremely reliable and easy to use.

“We’ll keep building it because people keep buying it,” Linksys Global Product Manager Vince La Duca said at the time, stating that the factor that kept the router on sale was that the parts for it continued to be manufactured.

I said earlier that in many ways the WRT54G was the Nintendo Entertainment System of wireless routers. And I think that is especially true in the context of the fact that it had a fairly sizable afterlife, just as the NES did. Instead of blocky graphics and limited video output options, the WRT54G’s calling cards are a very spartan design and networking capabilities that fail to keep up with the times, but somehow maintain their modern charm.

In a world where routers increasingly look like set pieces from syndicated sci-fi shows from the ’90s, there is something nice about not having to think about the device that manages your network.

The result of all this is that, despite its extreme age and not-ready-for-the-living-room looks, it sold well for years past its sell-by date—in large part because of its reliance on open-source drivers.

If your user base is telling you to stick with something, stick with it.

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