dust and drag

You can make more money than your grandparents did. You can also drive really fast, and you can change your sex. You can find friends without having to go to church, and you can see movies in your own house. You can get pictures of naked people almost anywhere, and you can curse out loud freely. You can buy dinner in a box and not have to wash anything after you eat it. You can fly to any city you want and meet a sexual partner, or you can talk to them on the phone. You can have bright light twenty-four hours a day without having to clean soot off the walls, and you can listen to any music you want anytime, anywhere. You can find people everywhere who like exactly the same things you do, and you can print your own books. You can buy vegetables from the other side of the earth, and you can build a house in a day. You can be perfectly warm or cool at every moment, and you can stay in school all your life. You can have sex fourteen thousand times and not have a baby. You can write with pens that don’t dry out, or leak, or have to be plucked from a bird, and you can hear about people being hacked to death thousands of miles away. You can see pictures through telescopes almost to the end of space and from the beginning of time, and you can keep milk fresher longer than ever before. You can shit in a bowl and then whisk it away, and you can visit caged wild animals in the middle of a city. You can buy things to make you see and hear better, and you can live anywhere you want. You can get your face stretched tight like when it was new, and you can be sick and not die for a really really long time. You can even wash your clothes in a machine so why can’t you figure out a way to be happy all the time?

—Chris Ware, The Acme Novelty Library (via thestuffhole)

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But, then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness — I hope you’re getting this down.

—Love and Death (Woody Allen, 1975). (via ckck)

…I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

—J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (via liquidnight)

But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.

—Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (via liquidnight)