We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. On that issue I am a liberal. I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city.

Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they’re thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They’re not trapped with cliches. Of the many imprisonments possible in our world, one of the worst must be to be inarticulate - to be unable to tell another person what you really feel. These characters can do that. Not that it saves them.

• Interviewer: When someone reads one of your books, what would you like them to take from the experience?
• Kurt Vonnegut: Well, I’d like the guy—or the girl, of course—to put the book down and think, “This is the greatest man who ever lived."

In The Desert, Stephen Crane

(via iago-rotten)

I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors. I am Friend to Carrion Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

(via peelace)