ponder on these

Now I am back to quoting the books that I read recently. I just noticed that these books make me somehow love life. These novels talk about death in a varying degree, but they all agree that you should live life to the fullest before death gets you. Haha, I just realized that I am not worrying much these days. My favorite expression now: Couldn’t be bothered.

Come on, spread the good news!



GREAT GATSBY

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.


A LONG WAY DOWN

Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared – Maureen

I screwed up. I’m not trying to make excuses for myself. I feel so wretched I want to die. – Martin

Why is it easier to, like, leap into the void than to face up to what you’ve done? – JJ

The truth was that I didn’t feel like a man who every now and then wanted to die, and there’s a difference. A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they’ve all let him down. I can’t believe that dying people feel that way, unless dying is worse than I thought. And why shouldn’t it be? Every other fucking thing is worse than I thought, so why should dying be any different? – JJ

You thought you were going to be someone; but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you’re looking at 40 or 50 years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That’s pretty heavy. That’s worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You’ve got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick merciful one. – Jess

Many people have a rope that ties them to someone, and than rope can be short or it can be long. – Jess

And you probably also know that when you look out of an aeroplane window and see the world shrink like that, you can’t help but think about the whole of your life, from the beginning until where you are now, and everyone you’ve ever known. And you’ll know that thinking about these things makes you feel grateful to God for providing them, and angry with Him for not helping you to understand them better, and so you end up in a terrible muddle and needing to talk to a priest. – Maureen

Is that so terrible, to be positive about something? – Maureen

I had wanted to kill myself, not because I hated living, but because I loved it. And the truth of the matter is, I think, that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way – I think that’s how Maureen, Jess and Martin feel. They love life and being shut out of it like that…It just fucking destroys you, man. So it’s like an act of despair, not an act of nihilism. It’s a mercy killing, not a murder. – JJ

Once you stop pretending that everything’s shitty and you can’t wait to get out of it, which is the story I’d been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and when it’s not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good. – Martin



DANCE DANCE DANCE
You gotta dance. As long as the music plays. You gotta dance. Don’t even think why. Stop to think, your feet stop. Your feet stop, we get stuck. We get stuck, you’re stuck. So don’t pay any min, no matter how dumb. You gotta keep the step. You gotta limber up. You gotta listen what you bolted down. You gotta use all you got. We know you’re tired, tired and scared. Happens to everyone, okay? Just don’t let your feet stop. – Sheep Man

Some people say it’s escapism. But that’s fine by me. I live my life, you live yours. If you’re clear about what you want, then you can live any way you please. I don’t give a damn what people say. They can be reptile for all I care. – Protagonist

Like if you love somebody, the love is always shifting or wavering. It’s always questioning or inflating or disappearing or denying or hurting. And the thing is, you can’t do anything about it. – Protagonist

For her, loneliness is something you have others remove from you. – Protagonist (pertaining to Amé).

Maybe as you get older, things fall apart, so something needs to help hold things together. Put the brakes a little on entropy, you know. – Protagonist

Humans achieve their peak in different ways. But whoever you are, once you’re over the summit, it’s downhill all the way. Nothing anyone can do about it. And the worst of it is, you never know where the peak is. You think you’re still going strong, when suddenly you’ve crossed the great divide. No one can tell. – Protagonist

With someone who’s dead, there’s no rush to make amends. She’ll dead for a long time. – Protagonist

If I go with her, there’ll come a time that I’ll regret it. But if I don’t go with her, I’ll be losing the key to my existence. – Dick North

I just put my heart into it. That’s the difference. It’s a question of attitude. If you really work at something, you can do it, up to a point. If you really work at being happy, you can do it, up to a point. – Protagonist

Instead of regretting what you did, you could have treated him differently from the beginning. You could have tried to be fair. But you didn’t. You don’t even have the right to be sorry. – Protagonist

People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It’s too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies. Personally, I don’t buy it. – Protagonist