‘But soon,’ he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, 'I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt.’
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
God, they say, is love.
And someone’s got to pass the word.
Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me
The sky changed, the entire translucent dome stunned by the swiftness of the shimmering atomic flash. The light drove their once tiny shadows to a terrifying distance in the making them look like Titans. Then it shrank, the aurora crashing insanely backward, like a film in reverse, toppling, swimming into a single white-hot bugle, a humming lump, a festering core. It hovered inches above the horizon, dancing waiting almost as if it were taking a stoked breath, then swelled in puffing spasms, poking high into the stratosphere, edging out the pale skyrocket vapor trails at either side, the ball going sickly yellow, the shock wave releasing its roar, the entire spectacle catching fire, blazing chaotically, shaming the paltry sun
Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me
‘I deplore brutality,’ he said. 'It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct’
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Agitate! Agitate!
Frederick Douglass
This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
He glimpsed an infinite gulf of darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know.
H. P. Lovecraft, The Haunter of the Dark