I had a bunch of crap up here about how I thought a collection of quotes from my favorite writers would be a great fucking universal experience. Small step for mankind and all that. The truth is that it's just a bunch of quotes from writers that I like. I don't like most writers. Most of the stuff I read is just pure trash. Even the supposed greats. I'm sure they are at the top of the craft and all that, but I just don't have any use for them. The language is meant to be banged around a bit. But it's powerful, too. Why it takes some people twenty paragraphs to say one useless thing, I'll never understand. Probably the same reason politicians give hour-long speeches. They figure you're not listening and maybe they can slip something in edgewise. Or, even worse, that there are a hyper-class of pundits and academicians who translate everything and then spoon feed it to the news outlets, who then water it down even more and spoon feed it to us. So, the next time you're snoozing through a Thomas Pynchon novel, just remember that there will be a movie out soon.

Here's a Mencken quote:

"The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them."

I just think this sums it up for me. And then you read another one and it's all summed up again. That's the beauty of quotes. Everything summed up until the next one comes along. We're all just adding up life lessons and quotes in our heads for the right experience. And we say, "a-ha", or "oooh" and "hmmmm", and then we duck our heads back down and filter, filter, filter out all the stupid, boring, pointless drivel that comes at us. I guess these things form a bulwark of sorts against inanity. You read what other people said and you say at least one or two people got ahold of it, if only for a moment. You wonder and hope that wisdom has some sort of trickle-down effect. Of course, it doesn't.

One of my favorite quotes from my favorite author, Walker Percy:

"The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to."

A little traveling suck of care. Is that you? If words like that can't strike you blind, knock you back to square one, then what? God help us all. Sorry if this doesn't make sense. You won't have to quote me.