“Aquinas said if you have knowledge you don’t need faith, and I think he was on to something, but for now all I can do is find the Church of Inadvertent Joy, and if and when I do, I’ll stumble in and drop fifty cents in the brass-plated poor box, ignite a beeswax candle and confess myself at the crossroads. Having professed my faithlessness, I will be blessed, and the psoriasis or eczema that’s thickened my feet and shattered the skin of my hands will instantly melt, for confession is good for the sole and fine for the fingers. Aquinas also said evil is a privation, ergo hell is a place that’s a void. The heavenly need for placement being motivation for all maps, including a face.”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“He smiles into the sun. He loves his wife more than life itself, why he even says, “I love you more than life itself,” and does not understand this is the most frightening thing anyone can say.”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“We haven’t got that kind of time. All we have is mind and mind, that slate of neurons for which the skull serves as hat rack, or so Dr. Bowles opines. And from these banks are piers from which little ones fall into the sea, never to be seen again, while others are found in straw baskets cottoned with sea foam. So also are fashioned the nibbling fish, noses and toeses, it’s all the same to them, though there is the hope that if properly incanted, they can twin in turn to feed the multitudes. Some neurons look like threads of snakes:”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“Each metropolis preselects its suicide like an officer packs a capsule, for if a city lives by remembering, mein Leibnitz Herr, the opposite must also be true, ergo a city dies from forgetting, and such death is by the city’s own hand, it turns it neglected bungalows to gallows and potholes its veins.”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“but being over’s no problemo, it’s the getting there that’s a bitch or a boor or a bother, to that small apresbellum, the birth of the universe in reverse, the door unshut after the party’s over and the guests uncoupled on the floor. In Las Vegas in the ‘50s, there were parties on hotel-tops, parties that went on all night long, everyone swinging to the sounds of some sassy swinging-hair’d sister backed by the brassy cool combo, and the show-stopper was the morning’s nuclear test, sponsored by the US Army, the white light skirled across the shar Nevada desert, blotting the sun, they called them dawn parties because they done broke the day.”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“In the image of God created he him.' We are the cheap sons and daughters the Father desires, for filthy Job triumphed over the King of Kings like a fart trumpeted through Notre Dame. Amen. Amen.”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“Life’s a Shepherd’s stew, he thinks, with thunderstruck clarity, there’s too much stringy this and too little the soft that, and the sweet nubbin you gladly chew is just a bit of lamb. Poor little lamb. Who made you?”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“Grief is like any dog, once in and fed, it won’t go, but crawls in a corner and stays. And my sorrow is the same stray sort of crotch and ass-sniffing scout, seeking a welcoming lap and a good scratch behind the ear.”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“QUESTION: Are you suggesting that history is irrelevant, then, and the temporal span of humankind merely the recycling of tropes?
ANSWER: Well, I think it’s two things. It’s always two things, unless it’s three. The first thing is moms and martyrs are the way we will think, just as when we dance we tend to tango. Jung suspected as much, you know, and every story could, I suppose, be seen as such a spyglass. Second, either there is or there isn’t, point-blank, and if there is not, and something besides lead backs our philosophies, then previously Truth flashed its temper like a fictitious schoolgirl showing her panties, then went all cowboy cool in the neonew, barely speaking, keeping mum, despite the fact we’s done forgot dear mammy, savoring the slow satisfying burn of a cigarette before the bonfire of a billion bodies, and still millions more wait their turn, we’re better at keeping our appointments, at any rate, skinny corpses stripped of teeth and hair and skin, difference plucked like daisies, for there is no difference; in ether words, to hear the Great Apes tell it, every plague is one for the pointless and every poppy’s got jack to do with Us. Hoohah! A particularly ballsy bit of business given the most recent nearing too close, we’re singing our rondel with a bellyful of gravy and sourmash, we’re at the highpocked end, and there’s no more to come, come the dawn. Though bear in mind we’ve no pret-a-porter poodle sniffing around here, nossir, we’re not afraid to say stay, still, we’ll stay right here, eating off the apple of your eye, carving the plump of your cheek caught in the family photo, the flash in the pan goes off and so does your head, or so Buttercup says, we’re stuck, that is to say, in the over-brought dawn of this new clearer Age, in which we play patsy to witness just this: everything is beauty-full, in its own way. . . .”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“Myles P. doesn’t resist, he sinks down and down, letting the sound of Willard’s lisp close over him light as a foaming wave and he drifts gently down, without a gurgle, past the floating beds of giant kelp and the abalone-eating otters, the unschooled senoritas and egg-filled cabezon, he thinks he might touch his toes to the bottom when he gets there and wonders if it will be mud or just more cement.
'Meaning other animals, shoot, soon as the young’s able to hunt or run, mother takes off and dad’s eyeing the offsprung for dinner. But we can’t let ours be, colic to college, we’re constantly wiping their little booger’d noses, dolling out free dough and freer advice, thinking they’ll powder our own asses later in the home. But a baby’s just a for-instance, fact is, others never tender the way you do. Species’d peter, rent’d come due.' Willard goes to Hiro, 'The punchline, my friend, is giving without wanting’s the trick once you’ve managed that, you’ve partly pierced heaven a bunghole, but it’s a pure penniless instigation that you ain’t got ‘n ain’t gonna get got, ‘n ain’t gonna get it, not on no roadfuckingtrip.'
'Meaning?' says Hiro
'Meaning love’s all true.”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“But whosh mocking who, Moan Sooie, who hung hope on me like a pre-lit fuse, I mean shit and goddamn, why supply a set of perfecktly good teeth then kick ‘em, one by precious one, out of my sorry cranium?”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“and do you think the new brood made it okay for Job to have seen those other sons and daughters dead, their lips shrinking to an icebox smile, or was that so much conciliatory salt on the sore, for all we know God takes us seriously, He does, you know, he blesses all our little pink toes, which he thoughtfully numbered ten, but even still we suspect that in the Big Picture we’re as fungible as cakes of soap or baskets of berries, our sense of purpose pointless as a beachball, it all pisses us off proper”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
Vanessa Place
Born place: in The United States
Born date May 10, 1968
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“I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much much more effectively than the people of good will.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from Letter from the Birmingham Jail
“Dont you think dreams and the Internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents.”
― Yasutaka Tsutsui, quote from Paprika
“One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, quote from A Season in Hell
“It isn't about the welfare check. It never was.
It isn't about sexual permissiveness, or personal morality, or failures in parenting, or lack of family planning. All of these are inherent in the disaster, but the purposefulness with which babies make babies in places like West Baltimore goes far beyond accident and chance, circumstance and misunderstanding. It's about more than the sexual drives of adolescents, too, though that might be hard to believe in a country where sex alone is enough of an argument to make anyone do just about anything.
In Baltimore, a city with the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, the epidemic is, at root, about human expectation, or more precisely, the absence of expectation.”
― David Simon, quote from The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
“He fell ass over tea Kettle”
― C.E. Murphy, quote from Urban Shaman
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