Veronika Decides to Die

I finally read Veronika Decides to Die, hoping, at last, to achieve full crazy-girl status.
I wasn't terribly impressed in that the book is an immensely direct and at times tedious allegory.
Maybe if I'd read it when I was younger?
It's more interesting viewed through the lens of social justice and/or liberation, I think.

But perhaps this is just another example of a bias I'm beginning to recognize more consistently: if the goal is to teach the audience something, then I don't think said audience should be aware of the lesson until the end, or certainly closer to it than the first 25 pages. It should be this unfolding, this a-ha moment, where everything clicks. I think the reader should have to make his/her own meaning in order for the lesson to be learned, and this book felt rather obvious and spoon-fed. At any rate. . .

"I'll tell everyone that the children are my reason for living, when in reality my life is their reason for living." (p.23)

"It was odd that no one had ever described Vitriol as a mortal poison, although most of the people affect could identify its taste, and they referred to the process of poisoning as bitterness. To a greater or lesser degree, everyone had some bitterness in their organism, just as we are all carriers of the tuberculosis bacillus. But these two illness only attack when a patient is debilitated; in the case of bitterness, the right conditions for the disease occur when the person becomes afraid of so-called reality." (p.90)

"Don't confuse insanity with a loss of control." (p.101)

Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

Random Quotations

"I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous." - Graffiti

"Interpretations of interpretations interpreted." - James Joyce

"Who ever said pleasure wasn't functional?" - Charles Eames

". . .qualities like quiveriness and vulnerability come to mind when I think of creativity. . ." - Douglas Hofstadter

"One albino doesn't a summer make." - Surrealist proverb

"We are all a product of the choices we make." - Albert Camus

"My mother says she's cold and then she makes me put on a coat." - Colin aged 7

"A grapefruit is a lemon that had a chance and took advantage of it." - Oscar Wilde

"We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips away, and flees eternally before us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations. We burn with desire to find firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity, but our whole foundation cracks and the earth opens." - Virginia Woolf

The Children's Hospital

". . .and she was twenty-one years tired. . ." (p.9)

"It was only six o'clock but she was ten p.m. drunk." (p.10)

"I am sending you to Jesus, I told her. But I remember the moment perfectly, and I know I was not trying to kill her because I thought it would make her happy." (p.24)

". . .a personal apogee of pleasantness." (p.205)

"When I was in college I had a recurring dream that I was Sylvia Plath's pony." (p.284)

Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

Reciprocity

Reciprocity.
Reciprocity and the belief in the possibility of change.
Those were my rules.
I broke them, and for what?

Orange Sherbet

Twice, today, I ate a small cup of orange and vanilla sherbet.
And it was only in these moments that anything was right in my world.
Apparently, orange sherbet is some pretty powerful stuff.

The rest is all maudelin and chopped liver.
Bird-boned sentiments.

Said the Girl, of Life in General:

This is a strange existence and I'm not sure how long it will last.

The Worst Things Are the True Things

I woke up.
(street cleaning)
I walked out to my car. I got in.
3 blocks later, I found a parking space.
I walked home.

Those 15 minutes were a delight, and therefore, a surprise.
I tried to write about it.
Just now, I tried again.
I wanted to carve out that cross-section of my morning so that you'd feel like you were there. So I could share the experience.

What am I trying to prove?
That I had those moments at all should be enough.

. . .

I'm angry.
I hope it stays a while.
New, and thereby, unwieldy.
I'm fed up with everyone and everything, which is why I want it to stay.
Eventually, the useful and the true will sink to the bottom or rise to the top - however you choose to frame it.

"Hate the world, not yourself."
(lather, rinse, repeat)

Because it's not as if I create these embittered myopic versions of reality on a daily basis. I spend far too much of my time understanding and accepting and searching for the good. The hardest things to hear, the things I try not to feel. . .

The litany of unpleasantries.
Focus in, because the worst things, are the true things.
And tonight, I find that oddly comforting.

. . .And Trying to Keep a Happy Face

"August is the month when wars start. It's when water dries up and the spirit begins to wither. Insomniacs pull down their shades and lock themselves in their rooms in August. Lifelong friends have fist fights. People feel like they're going to burst. Sometimes they do."
- Al Aronowitz, August Blues

I don't go looking, because I know there is only so much to find.
I distract myself from reading, because it prolongs the process.
A good book is like good sex, a worn velour blanket, or a tyranny of other weary similes.
A good book protects me from myself and others.
And I don't want it to be over.

I want the things which keep me in one place.
The prose and story that cancel out the static.
I don't need time to stop.
I just want it to be quiet.

Sometimes, I wish more of us had hidden manuscripts to leave behind.
But I would have settled for just him.

Unofficially But Unmistakably

"Franny has the measles, for one thing. Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. The new announcer is worse than Grant - if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days. He said she surely dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs."
-J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters

Restricted Number

Two cycles, so I answer
Strangest prank call.
Southern drawl.
"you don't know who this is, do you?"
"not when I'm sleeping"
"I'll give you a hint. what's the craziest thing you've done in the last six months?"
Um. . .'bury' my dad who was shot six times?
And I was in the middle of an exceptionally interesting dream too.

"Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing."
~Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The Body. . .

"the body
has got to be worth saving
eyelids are shining
with headache and perspiration
morning is finding
good intentions under sleep's persuasion. . ."

it's funny how the body speaks out, even when lips aren't moving
false or true, the body manifests
it's like emotion isn't enough

so you stay sick for months, or you can't eat
not even ice cream, and it's your favorite

your body screams at you to take notice

but we are so skilled at the separation

I'm Not a Writer. . .

I'm not a writer. I've got the empty bed to prove it.
But I love words for their company.
I excell at the art of living inside my head.

Those who cannot do, teach.
Who said that?
Fuck them.

Vodka Helps

"The stitches already strained against the burden of keeping his face together".
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Vertically Letting the Life From You

Because, right now, there are hundreds of people on a single college campus and every last one of them knew my father, or know of him.
Because I had to go to sleep every night so that he could change my batteries.
Because he got lost on purpose.
Because he told me to invite the mummy to tea.
Because he waited to be a father to everyone else.
Because he wouldn't let us kill spiders.
I'm jealous of all those who can write about their fathers.
Because obviously, I can't.

Bel Canto

"She had no talent for asking but she was a genius at being quiet."
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

"I Know How Hard This Is For You"

Claire: I know how hard this is for you.

Catherine: Listening to you say how hard it is for me is what's hard for me.

Proof
David Auburn

"Pasta Would Be Easy"

Robert: Pasta, oh God, don't even say the word "pasta." It sounds so hopeless, like surrender: "Pasta would be easy." Yes, yes it would. Pasta. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a euphemism people invented when they got sick of eating spaghetti.

Proof
David Auburn

"What Do You Do For Sex?"

Catherine: So, Hal.

Hal: What?

Catherine: What do you do for sex?

Hal: What?

Catherine: At your conferences.

Hal: Uh, I uh-

Catherine: Isn't that why people hold conferences? Travel. Room service. Tax-deductible sex in big hotel beds?

Proof
David Auburn

"It's a Good Sign That You're Fine. . ."

Robert: Where's the problem?

Catherine: The problem is you are crazy!

Robert: What difference does that make?

Catherine: You admitted- You just told me that you are.

Robert: So?

Catherine: You said a crazy person would never admit that.

Robert: Yeah, but it's. . .Oh. I see.

Catherine: So?

Robert: It's a point.

Catherine: So how can you admit it?

Robert: Well. Because I'm dead. Aren't I?

Catherine: You died a week ago.

Robert: Heart failure. Quick. The funeral's tomorrow.

Catherine: That's why Claire's flying in from New York.

Robert: Yes.

Catherine: You're sitting here. You're giving me advice. You brought me champagne.

Robert: Yes.

Catherine: Which means. . .

Robert: For you?

Catherine: Yes.

Robert: For you, Catherine, my daughter, who I love very much. . . It could be a bad sign

Proof
David Auburn