Trudy asks do I wanna smoke a bowl.
"No way. That'd push me right over the edge."
"Into what?"
"Depression. Anxiety, Paranoia. Insanity, basically. One of those graves.."
"God, people are so weird," she says. "It's not drugs that make you that way, you know. It's the way we all already are."

Grab on to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way, Bryan Charles

The custom is to not let the sheep see the knife. Ali feeds the animal a cube of sugar - another custom, to make death sweeter. The sheep kicks, but not much. The mullah grabs it under its jaw and places the blade on its neck. Just a second before he slices the throat in one expert motion, I see the sheep's eyes. It is a look that will haunt my dreams for week.s I don't know why I watch this yearly ritual in our backyard; my nightmares persist long after the bloodstains on the grass have faded. But I always watch. I watch because of that look of acceptance in the animal's eyes. Absurdly, I imagine the animal understands. I imagine the animal sees that its imminent demise is for a higher purpose. This is the look...
-----------
I ran because I was a coward. I was afraid of Assef and what he would do to me. I was afraid of getting hurt. THat's what I told myself as I turned my back to the alley, to Assan. That's what I made myself believe. I actually aspired to cowardise, because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef was right: Nothing is free in this world.

     ~ The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini



"I reached across the table and put my hand on his. My student hand, clean and soft, his laborer's hand, grubby and calloused. It thought of all the trucks, train sets, and bikes he'd bought me in Kabul. Now America. One last gift for Amir."

The author of this book does not believe in disingenuous jacket blurbs, insincere product descriptions, or intrusive biographical information. He believes that less information regarding the content of a serious book is beneficial to the reading experience.

In short, the book you're holding, in the words of its author, is "just a story about a boy and his mom and how lost we got last October."

Sincerely,
The Editors

In my opinion, generally speaking, an individual only lives one great story in his lifetime, and the rest is strictly for reminiscing purposes.

Bandanas & October Supplies

Ben: (holds out his keys and plays with them) Ok....it's uh....a smooth, hard, round loop, connecting three shiny sharp metal.

Kinney: No, no. Don't say metal.

Ben: Connecting three, uh, shiny, sharp, hard, thin, strips, which have teeth -- sort of.

Kinney: Ok. Now, talk about the object subjectively.

Ben: They're my keys to my apartment.

Kinney: Why are these keys important to you?

Ben: I don't know. This is stupid, sir. I shouldn't even do this.

Kinney: You're doing fine. Talk about the object.

Ben: (exhales) All right, well, for this to make sense, you gotta kinda understand -- that my father and I never....well...it's his fault, it's my fault. He'd say it's my fault. I don't know. It's not fair, but whatever. We don't have a very good thing, but as it gets bad for me and him. I think it get, eh, even worse for my mom. Whose so incredible, she's so beautiful, and she's, you know, she's elegant. But, she gets so sad, she gets so upset when me and my dad fight. Her face just get's, um....she just cries a lot. And I've seen these pictures of them, too. My parents before they had me. And they looked so happy...so happy. So I know it wasn't always like it is now. Anyway, I guess, it's obviously that these keys mean I'm not home anymore. You know, which great for me. I'm sub-letting from this guy, Sean. He's this really nice, frustrated entrepreneur guy. It's me and three other guys. You know, it's cool, you actually want to hang out. It's a big place. But more then all that. These keys mean that I'm not causing anything at home. I'm here right now, so my dad and I don't have to deal with each other, you know. And so my mom isn't so sad. I hope. It's just good. It's better for everyone. I really believe that....that I have these keys.

- Felicity, 1.03, "Hot Objects"

I mean, we're just walking around in some kind of fog. I think we're all in a trance! We're walking around like zombies! I don't think we're even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things, we're just going around all day like unconscious machines, I mean, while there's all of this rage and worry and uneasiness just building up and building up inside us!

**********
Because somehow in our social existence today we're only allowed to express our feelings weirdly and indirectly. If you express them directly everybody goes crazy!

**********
But those are typical evenings for us. I mean, we go to dinners, and parties like that all the time. These evenings are really like sort of sickly dreams, because people are talking in symbols. Everyone's sort of floating through this fog of symbols and unconscious feelings. No one says what they're really thinking about. Then people start making these jokes, that are really some sort of secret code!

**********
You know, it may be, Wally, that one of the reasons that we don't know what's going on is that when we're there at a party, we're all too busy performing.

**********
Oh! God! And I mean, those [self-help] books are just so touching because they show how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us are really getting on in life, even though by performing these roles all the time we're just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other.



My Dinner with Andre