Friday, September 26, 2008

In the lives of children...

In the lives of children, pumpkins can turn into coaches, mice and rats into human beings. When we grow up, we learn that its far more common for human beings to turn into rats.
-Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, x

Monday, September 8, 2008

I was thrown out...

I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me. When I was thrown out, my mother, who was an emotionally high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles. I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the sessions you miss.

-Woody Allen, Annie Hall, 1977

Like a shark.

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark. -Woody Allen, Annie Hall, 1977

Annie, there's a big lobster...

Annie, there's a big lobster behind the refrigerator. I can't get it out. This thing's heavy. Maybe if I put a little dish of butter sauce here with a nutcracker, it will run out the other side.
-Woody Allen, Annie Hall, 1977

And it's all over much too quickly...

There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly. The... the other important joke, for me, is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud's "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious," and it goes like this - I'm paraphrasing - um, "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member." That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.

-Woody Allen, Annie Hall, 1977

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Most of us would be mostly forgotten.

Some people would never forget certain people, a few would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten. Sometimes it was for the best…But did anybody want to be forgotten about completely? We had dedicated years making names for ourselves, we had to beliee in our hearts that each one of us was memorable. And yet who wanted to be remembered for their poor taste or bad breath? Still, better to be remembered for those things than forgotten for your perfect par-boiled blandness.
-Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End, 368

Conformity

To conform is to lose your soul.
-Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End, 343