If California’s place in American history is as a destination that is therefore also an ending, a dream-voyage’s foreclosure before tipping into the Pacific, Manifest Destiny become Manifest Distress, then Los Angeles is a bluff, a tenuous proposition, a place built so quickly that everyone’s nerves are still jangled from its sudden appearance and the obligation to act as though it actually exists.

— Jonathan Lethem, from an essay in the Paris Review (accompanying a selection of Catherine Corman’s Daylight Noir photographs of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles)

Children robbed of love will dwell in magic.

— Barbara Kingsolver, “Animal Dreams”

There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don’t you see?! We’re actors - we’re the opposite of people!

— Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (via liquidnight)

There’s no such thing as adventure; there’s no such thing as romance. There’s only trouble, and desire…. And when you desire something, you immediately get into trouble. And when you’re in trouble, you don’t desire anything at all.

— Hal Hartley’s Simple Men (via thingsilikemorethanpeople)

There’s gotta be a record of you someplace
You gotta be on somebody’s books
The lowdown - a picture of your face
Your injured looks
The sacred and profane
The pleasure and the pain
Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
And it’s your face I’m looking for on every street

— Dire Straits, On Every Street

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

—

Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

(via smriti: liquidnight: crashinglybeautiful)

They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there — and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace until they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flits by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.

— Jack Kerouac, On The Road (Ch 5)

Among those who advocate hate-crime laws, it’s always the sexuality of the victim that’s front and center, not the sexuality of the criminal or the everyday, undifferentiated violence he took to extremity. Among the tolerance peddlers, it’s always the “lifestyle” of the gay guy, never the “lifestyle” of the straight guy or the culture of compulsory heterosexuality. Even among those who argue that the victim’s sexuality is irrelevant — that Shepard died just because a robbery went bad, or just because McKinney and Henderson were crazy on crank — the suggestion is that the crime is somehow less awful once homophobia is removed, and what is brewing inside the boys bears less attention. “The news has already taken this up and blew it totally out of proportion because it involved a homosexual,” McKinney’s father told the press.

Eighteen blows with a .357 magnum—murder happens.

— Excerpted from A Boy’s Life: For Matthew Shepard’s killers, what does it take to pass as a man? by JoAnn Wypijewski originally published in Harper’s magazine, September 1999. Quoted in ‘Ten Years Later,’ The Matthew Shepard Story Retold (NPR, October 12 2009)