“For fucksake became a regular word in her vocabulary.”
―Andi Boyd, The Inconvenient Dead
Your friends and relatives can be a pain – but you miss them when they are gone
From Drunkenboat
““I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula
There is terror in the woods and terror in the well, but the worst of all is time – the irresistible, inevitable, and, omnipotent ignominy.
“I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sun-baked lands where there is no frost in men’s bones. ”
― Liam O’Flaherty
Though I am partially of Irish heritage (and Scottish and German and Native American and ???) I know nothing of Irish history. This short story is set in the Battle of Dublin in June of 1922 and it an arresting testament to the horrors of war and the particular horrors of civil war. I think it might get me to do some research and reading. Another rabbit hole.
““The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”
― George R.R. Martin
Are we always responsible for our actions?
From Lightspeed
“Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.”
― Marilyn Monroe
Sometimes the internet is a time machine – a melancholy and distorted one.
“my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.”
― Charles Bukowski
There is a certain kind of long-term despair….
“Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden
Joyce Carol Oates is such a genius – it is scary. Her stories never turn out how you think they will and… most importantly… she is not afraid to go there.
“With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.”
― Tim Parks
Keys, a dream, canoes, and the latest squeeze.
From the New Yorker.
“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes
A short piece about hope – and the idea that maybe we aren’t as stupid as we seem.
“This is what I say: I’ve got good news and bad news.
The good news is, you don’t have to worry, you can’t change the past.
The bad news is, you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past.
The universe just doesn’t put up with that. We aren’t important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We’re not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
If you could go into the future – maybe only a few hours – can you have your cake and eat it too?
from Flash Fiction Online
Bill Chance 