Wuthering Heights

There's a new Wuthering Heights film adaptation coming out in 2011! It's in post-production. Directed by Andrea Arnold and starring my latest favorite young actress, Kaya Scodelario. It also features the first black Heathcliff. This is very exciting...

"The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called faith."

— Robert Ingersoll

Death Cab for Cutie Lyrics

I'm always on this great photo sharing website, and there are alot of cool pictures that have been combined with quotes. It's kind of like photographic versions of Quotable Cards. I love it. But there are quotes I want to see but never do, so I decided to make some of my own.

Liking what Stephen King has to say...

"If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you."

Some NIN to ponder....

What if everything around you isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you think you know is an elaborate dream?
If you look at your reflection is it all you want it to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks?
Would you find yourself afraid to see?

What if all the world's inside of your head - just creations of your own?
Your devils and your gods, all the living and the dead, and you're really all alone?
You can live in this illusion; you can choose to believe.

Asparagus by Margaret Atwood

This afternoon a man leans over
the hard rolls and the curled
butter, and tells me everything: two
women love him, he loves them, what
should he do?

The sun
sifts down through the imperceptibly
brownish urban air. I'm going to
suffer for this: turn red, get
blisters or else cancer. I eat
asparagus with my fingers, he
plunges into description.
He's at his wit's end, sewed
up in his own frenzy. He has
breadcrumbs in his beard.
I wonder
if I should let my hair go grey
so my advice will be better.
I could wrinkle up my eyelids,
look wise. I could get a pet lizard.
You're not crazy, I tell him.
Others have done this. Me, too.
Messy love is better than none,
I guess. I'm no authority
on sane living.

Which is all true
and no hep at all, because
this form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards,
or what kind of screams and grimaces
it pushed you into.

The shrimp arrive on their skewers,
the courtyard trees unroll
their yellow caterpillars,
pollen powders our shoulders.
He wants them both, he relates
tortures, the coffee
arrives and altogether I am amazed
at his stupidities.

I sit looking at him
with a sort of wonder;
or is it envy?
Listen, I say to him,
you're very lucky.

The Apparition of these Faces in the Crowd... (Ezra Pound)

Considering the shockingly global economy and social world we live in today, how is it possible that so many people seem to look the same? I walk around campus and see people who look just like people I have known before. And yet, these are entirely new people in a new community.

There are specific "looks" that seem to be repeated more often than others. Horsey faces, those kinds of mouths that don't naturally close; the upper lip is always raised and the teeth exposed. Chubby girls with receding chins also seem to pop up frequently. Often these "look" types are so similar from person to person that they could be siblings.

Yes, we are all descended from some common glop of sludge, but so much change and evolution has occurred since then I wonder why we aren't more varied. It makes sense in the years before easy travel because the farthest breeding partner was usually from a couple towns over.

Is the issue just that wide spans of travel have only become possible in what is really quite recent by the standards of humanity's time-line. There just hasn't been enough time to get a higher variety of appearances.

But why do a few specific "looks" appear so often, instead of us just all looking similar? Lots of people look quite unique, but there are three or four types that I always notice.

Additionally, what is the significance of the recent discovery that some of us have Neanderthal blood running in our veins? Are these people some of the ones that look so distinct and yet similar to many others in their own set? Are all the horse faced girls the ones with Neanderthal heritage?

Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost

When one woman strikes at the heart of another she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.

You see, I have no intention of breaking down her prodigiousness. I want her to believe in God and virtue and the sanctity of marriage and still not be able to stop herself. I want the excitement of watching her betray everything that's most important to her.

I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with. And in the end, I've distilled everything to one single principle: win or die.

-Dangerous Liasons

Another New World, Josh Ritter

Clearly I have none of my own words to share, so I'm forced to share others that I find touching.

The leading lights of the age all wondered amongst themselves what I would do next; after all that I'd found in my travels around the world was there anything left?

"Gentlemen", I said, "I've studied the maps, and if what I'm thinking is right, there's another new world at the top of the world for whoever can brave through the ice."

I looked round the room in that way I once had and I saw that they wonted belief...So I said, "All I've got are my guts and my God"...Then I paused..."and the Annabelle Lee."

Oh the Annabelle Lee, I saw their eyes shine; the most beautiful ship in the sea.
My Nina, My Pinta, My Santa Maria, my beautiful Annabelle Lee.

That spring we set sail as the crowds waved from shore and on board the crew waved their hats, but I never had family, just the Annabelle Lee, so I'd never had cause to look back.
I just set the course North and I studied the charts, and toward dark I drifted toward sleep, and I dreamed of the fine deep harbor I'd find past the ice for my Annabelle Lee.

After that it got colder the world got quiet; it was never quite day or quite night, and the sea turned the color of sky turned the color of sea turned the color of ice, 'til at last all around us was vastness, one vast glassy desert of arsenic white. The waves that once lifted us sifted instead into drifts against Annabelle's sides.

The crew gathered closer; at first for the comfort each morning would bring a new set of the tracks in the snow leading over the edge of the world... 'til I was the only one left.

After that it gets cloudy, but it feels like I lay there for days or maybe for months. But Annabelle held me, the two of us happy just to think back on all we had done. We talked of the other new worlds we'd discover; she gave up her body to me, and as I chopped up her mainsail for timber I told her of all that we still had to see.

As the frost turned her moorings to nine-tail and the wind lashed her sides in the cold, I burned her to keep me alive every night in the lover's embrace of her hold.

I won't call it "rescue" what brought me back to the old world to drink and decline, and pretend that the search for another new world was well worth the burning of mine.

But sometimes at night in my dreams comes the singing of some unknown tropical bird, and I smile in my sleep thinking Annabelle Lee has finally made it to another new world.

So Runs the World Away

This man is a poet through and through. How can any one person be so multiply gifted?


It's a hungry world out there; even the wind will take a bite. I can feel the world circling, sniffing round me in the night. The lost sheep grow teeth, forsake the lambs and lie with the lions.

The living is desperate precarious and mean and getting by is so hard that even the rocks are picked clean. The bones of small contention are the only food the hungry find; where the thistles eat the thorns and the roses have no chance. The sky's so cold and clear the stars might stick you where you stand, and you're only glad it's dark because you might see the master's hand; you might cast around forever and never find the peace you seek.

For every cry in the night somebody says, "Have faith! Be content inside your questions"
Tell me, what's the point of light when you have to strike a match to find?

So throw away those lamentations; we both know them all too well.
If there's a book of jubilations we'll have to write it for ourselves.
So come and lie beside me darling, and let's write it while we still got time.

So if you got a light, hold it high for me.
I need it bad tonight, hold it high for me in that lonesome place.
With all the hurt that I've done that can't be undone, hold it high for me.
Light and guide me through; I'll do the same for you,
Hold it high for me; I'll hold it high for you,
Because I know you've got your own valley to walk.
Though it's dark as death and then gets darker, though your path is blocked, I'll hold it high for you through the thieves and rocks and keep you safe from harm.

-Josh Ritter

What I used to be will pass away and then you'll see that all I want now is happiness for you and me. -Elliott Smith

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

-- Stephen Crane

A Poison Tree, William Blake

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine.
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

I don't think Ok Go gets enough credit for thier humorous and intelligent lyricism:

The demon's in the design; seemed like a good idea at the time. How it all went down, only Pilate knows - the only thing I ever asked of him was when the bars were closed. 

The Usual Suspects

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

Yay Josh Ritter!

Seeing him May 20th...can't wait.

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike.  She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull.  She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew that it existed somewhere . . . She had to wait, she thought, and grow up to that world.


The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found challenging; it was ineptitude-a gray spread of cotton that seemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way.  She stood, disarmed, before the riddle of what made this possible.  She could find no answer.


Through the years of her childhood, [she] lived in the future – in the world she expected to find, where she would not have to feel contempt or boredom. 


The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn’t any.

The Magus by John Fowles

"if a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence. But I am not talking about God. I am talking about science".

Ok unfortunately my computer is broken hardcore so I can't type all I want to say. But Bills present to me was the most thoughtful thing anyone has done. I got to see Josh Ritter live! And now were going again in may and I am so excited. I will probably die. I especially want to see him perform "Kathleen".

How great are his lyrics?!! This is part of "Rumors" off his newest album.

He plays pianos with fistfuls
Of broken Belvedere crystal
And he's trying to forget you
But the music's never loud enough

So you're gonna have to show me
How that dance is done
The one where somebody leaves someone

He's impaling the front row
Fighting fires with arrows
And he'll act like he forgot you
But the music's never loud enough

And this is from "Man Burning" off of "Hello Starling". Not only are his lyrics amazing, but the music itself kills me it's so beautiful.

Don't stand so close to me
Don't be another tragedy
I've burned everybody who had a hand to lend
No one put me in this hell
I lit a fire underneath myself
Now I'm blazing the same old trail back to you again

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit. -Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Grey

"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."
— Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy)

"Into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice. "
— Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy)

"What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.'"
— Søren Kierkegaard (Either - Or)

"Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others."
— Oscar Wilde

"We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell."
— Oscar Wilde

"In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. . . . My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known- no wonder, then, that I return the love."
— Søren Kierkegaard


"Those who do not like you fall into two categories; the stupid and the envious."
— John Wilmot


"I regret nothing. No woman with any self-respect would have done less. The question of good and evil will always be one of philosophy's most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. I'm not quarreling with your choice of issues, only with your intellectually diminished approach. If evil means to be self-motivated, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth cliches lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind's destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race. "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)