“How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.
All right. Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God. Then you could wake up and yawn and stretch and grin at a world that was put together on a plan of mercy and death, punishment for evil, joy for good, and if the game was crazy at least it had rules. But that didn't make sense. It had never made any sense. The trouble was, now that he was not asleep and not awake, what he saw and heard didn't make sense either.
Mishmash, he thought. You know enough to know how you feel is senseless, but you don't know enough to know why.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“He did not want to see the war movie. It would be full of shit.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“Didn't they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don't they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don't have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing. But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, "I don't swim in your toilet, so please don't pee in my pool!" and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I'm doing, and they're all so nice.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“Remove,’ I said to myself, `the impetus to private ownership, and you have made the first giant step toward removing the causes of injustice in the world. There would be no greed if there were no possessions, no jealousy, no envy, perhaps even no hatred.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn't anybody's fault but your own. Of course that was the problem.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“He promptly forgot all about being the hero of a coward’s nightmare,”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
“It was an awful word. Nothing. It made him sick at heart. He refused to believe it. Hebdemanded that there be something he could do. He demanded that his love be worth something to his child. If it wasn't, life was garbage. He hd to rulenout the idea that life was just a matter of accident, of percentages, because it was just too goddamn much to stand for. There had to be some way you could make yourself be felt.”
― Don Carpenter, quote from Hard Rain Falling
Don Carpenter
Born place: in Berkeley, California, The United States
Born date March 16, 1931
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“But it wasn't their separation that was consuming my mind just then; it was Evelyn's garden. Bee had taken us there when we were children, and it was all rushing back: a magical world of hydrangeas, roses, and dahlias, and lemon shortbread cookies on Evelyn's patio. It seemed like only yesterday that my sister and I sat on the little bench under the trellis while Bee hovered over her easel, capturing on her canvas whatever flower was in bloom in the lush beds. "Your garden," I said, "I remember your garden."
"Yes," Evelyn said, smiling.
I nodded, a little astonished that this memory, buried so deep in my mind, had risen to the surface just then like a lost file from my subconscious. It was as if the island had unlocked it somehow.”
― Sarah Jio, quote from The Violets of March
“He had figured out that thoughts exist in silence and have no colour or sound or shape until they are turned into words. Spoken words exist in the mind first and then go to the voice and sit temporarily inside ears, and if words are conveyed through sign language, they exist in the motion of hands.”
― quote from The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow
“Time is like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. You can never go back.”
― Suzanne Woods Fisher, quote from The Keeper
“Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.”
― Steven Pressfield, quote from The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
“The moon. Even though we know it’s coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from MaddAddam
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