turtles rulz

“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvellous moral, I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

* * *

‘You hate America, don’t you?’ she said.
‘That would be as silly as loving it,’ I said. ‘It’s impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn’t interest me. It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.’

* * *
A barfly started talking to me.
‘You know what the answer to communism is?’ he asked me.
‘Nope,’ I said.
‘Moral Rearmament,’ he said.
‘What the hell is that?’ I said.
‘It’s a movement,’ he said.
‘In what direction?’ I said.
‘That Moral Rearmament movement,’ he said, ‘believes in absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love.’
‘I certainly wish them all the luck in the world,’ I said.

* * *

‘There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,’ I said, ‘but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all lands of ugliness so attractive.’

from “Mother Night” by Kurt Vonnegut

“In a way, it was sort of depressing, too, because you kept wondering what the hell would happen to all of them. When they got out of school and college, I mean. You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring–”

* * *

“

The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You’d have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn’t. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn’t take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart. I’m not kidding.”

* * *

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now.”

* * *

“A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I’m going apply myself when I go back to school next September. It’s such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don’t. I think I am, but how do I know?”

 “I have a feeling that you’re riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall.  But I don’t honestly know what kind…. It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college.  Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, ‘It’s a secret between he and I.’  Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer.  I just don’t know.”

from “Catcher in the rye” by J. D. Salinger

For the poor themselves—I do not mean the noisy professional poor, but the silent, fighting poor—one is bound to feel a genuine respect. One honours them, as one honours a wounded soldier.

In the perpetual warfare between Humanity and Nature, the poor stand always in the van. They die in the ditches, and we march over their bodies with the flags flying and the drums playing.

One cannot think of them without an uncomfortable feeling that one ought to be a little bit ashamed of living in security and ease, leaving them to take all the hard blows. It is as if one were always skulking in the tents, while one’s comrades were fighting and dying in the front.

They bleed and fall in silence there. Nature with her terrible club, “Survival of the Fittest”; and Civilisation with her cruel sword, “Supply and Demand,” beat them back, and they give way inch by inch, fighting to the end. But it is in a dumb, sullen way, that is not sufficiently picturesque to be heroic.

from “Novel Notes” by Jerome K. Jerome

Brown’s chief ambition in life is to be original, and his method of obtaining the original is to take the unoriginal and turn it upside down.If Brown were given a little planet of his own to do as he liked with, he would call day, night, and summer, winter.  He would make all his men and women walk on their heads and shake hands with their feet, his trees would grow with their roots in the air, and the old cock would lay all the eggs while the hens sat on the fence and crowed.  Then he would step back and say, “See what an original world I have created, entirely my own idea!”

There are many other people besides Brown whose notion of originality would seem to be precisely similar.

from “Novel Notes” by Jerome K. Jerome 

“Tell the angel who will watch over your life, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, momentarily thought himself the equal of God and who, with all the humility of a Christian, came to realize that in God’s hands alone reside supreme power and infinite wisdom. These prayers may perhaps ease the remorse that he takes with him in the depth of his heart.

As for you, Morrel, this is the whole secret of my behaviour towards you: there is neither happiness nor misfortune in this world, there is merely the comparison between one state and another, nothing more. Only someone who has suffered the deepest misfortune is capable of experiencing the heights of felicity. Maximilien, you must needs have wished to die, to know how good it is to live.

So, do live and be happy, children dear to my heart, and never forget that, until the day when God deigns to unveil the future to mankind, all human wisdom is contained in these two words:’wait’ and ‘hope’!”

from “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning —

from “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

He remembered once when the grass was damp and she came to him on hurried feet, her thin slippers drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes nestling close and held up her face, showing it as a book open at a page.

“Think how you love me,” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”

from “Tender is the Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Somewhere I read an explanation of self-confidence as being like Catch 22. You need to have a few achievements in order to boost your confidence, but you also need confidence to achieve those things. How do you escape this circle? What prevents you from having the confidence that you’ll succeed in a particular area? What brings you such kind of confidence where you don’t need previous exprience in the area in order to explore it without doubting your abilities to do it?

I’m tired of people trying to impose something on me. I would walk the corridors in my school and some random guy would just try to attract attention with what he calls his individuality. If you ignore him, he’d grab you by the collar of your jacket and scream his brand new stupidity in your face to see if he’d make an impression. And if you are still not interested or oppose, he’d try to show how uncool you are or just ignore you. Both options work for me as long as he is not screaming for attention anymore.

You’ve probably noticed that most trends are set by people who are in a way… mediocre, by the mass. And why is that? Perhaps because people feel they can do it because they’re a majority but that’s not the only reason at all. In order to win this majority, they have to gain it somehow. The mass is pushy and aggressive and even though they have the majority, they still seem to feel somehow threatened by people with different kind of individuality, so they try to find a way out. They try to make alternative lifestyles look weird, uncool or even dangerous. In a way they try to convince themselves and the others that this is something unnatural, so if you follow it, there must be something wrong. What they try to show is that they don’t care about alternative lifestyles but actually they feel uncomfortable when they face it, or even in a away insecure. I don’t know why. Perhaps they are afraid of changes, so they unconsciously try to make the others like them and have more people on their side. By showing that people wearing sweatshirts aren’t cool and get ridiculed, they hope to find cold comfort when others who still waver here and there start sharing their opinion, probably out of fear of reprisal, social opinion and how it would affect them, etc. That’s what they need to feel stronger and more secure. Another reason is probably that they are afraid of being lonely. It happens when you haven’t grown up yet – you need to be a part of a group and identify with it. That way you feel less lonely.

In Bulgaria we have a lot of chalga clubs, but only a few ones where they play alternative music. Imagine you are a child that is just getting to know the world of music. You either have no opportunity to hear different music or you see that people from unpopular groups are mocked and segragated and you just choose the easiest way out – to be a conformist and become part of the bigger group. The mass is not only satisfied with its own ordinary lifestyles, they want everybody else to become like them, so that their comfort is not disturbed. So they choose attack as the best defence. Nevertheless they boast they’d rather die than live those people’s lives, deep inside themselves, they envy them, because those people are brave enough to choose something different, because they took more advantage of the freedom they are given. This reminds me of a lyrics by A Perfect Circle:

“Freedom of choice is what you’ve got,

freedom from choice is what you want.”

Sad but true. This is also how peer pressure works. You either agree with the group, or you’re an outsider.

It’s sad that sometimes we realize this pressure but perhaps because we don’t feel strong enough we still try to live up to the expectations, because we’re supposed to do what our environment demands. As a friend you are supposed to do this and play that role, as a son/daughter this and that, etc.. we deprive ourselves of our true aspirations and freedom.