All you need

All You Need Is Love Was Not True

- Xinlisupreme, All You Need Is Love Was Not True

Hope

You might sometimes think you're sinking, but I'll laugh and tell you it's just fine.

- Slowdive, Alison, as paraphrased by Isis.

You were the dawn

It's not that I can't go on without you
Got a lot of things to do
Busy, busy all the time
Still I can't stop thinking about you

- Electrelane, Birds

Schizophrenia, USA

It is clear that the appalling Abu Ghraib photographs were already intensely eroticised stagings whose scenarios were derived from cheap American pornography. Love and Napalm: Export USA, indeed. Part of the reason that the Abu Ghraib images were so traumatic for a deeply conflicted American culture which combines religious moralism with hyper-sexualised commerce, and which is united only by a taste for megaviolence, is that they exposed the equation between military intervention and sexual humiliation that the official culture both depends upon and must suppress.

- K-Punk

Kings were raw

Ray: How do you even get to be king, anyway?

Roast Beef: Just punch hell of suckers in the mouth and tell chicks straight up that you like them.

- Achewood

Where can you be, my love?

Your voice
was a satellite spinning next to me
now I can't hear
over the radio, someone said
A satellite just went down, into the sea

So I go
I fathom leagues
I am the undertow
I wait peacefully

So now I'm waiting for a signal or a sound
where can you be found now?
where can you be found now, my love
where can you be?
waiting for a signal or a sound

- TV on the Radio, Satellite

Epitaph

So listen, sweet Lord, forgive me my sins
'cause I can't stand this life without all of these things
I know I done wrong, I found heaven on Earth
I know I done wrong, but I could've done me worse

Jesus please meet me at the centre of the Earth
'cause these wings are gonna fail me, and I could've done me worse...

- Spacemen 3, Walking With Jesus

The rest of your life, aged 5

Philippe: Mr Bear, what will the rest of my life be like?

Cornelius Bear: Well, I suppose you'll enter grade school, were you'll preoccupy yourself with conspicuously eating only the most popular items. Then you'll go to college, where you'll form an experimental band that will do controversial things, like play in 15/23rd time and shower together. After college, you'll take a trip to the southern California desert, where you'll eat plants that your parents despise, and realise that you are fantastic. From there you'll attempt to write the great American novel, and support yourself if ways not of your choosing. Hopefully sooner rather than later you'll crack open a book that is older than Coca-Cola and realise that here, under the sun, there is nothing new left to be written. Once you recover, you can just rattle of what you like and sell it by the pound.

Philippe: Wow, I get to take a shower with a band? Totally cool!

- Achewood

When it all gets too much, part 2

I want nothing
Than to dissolve in the night and to feel direction no more.

- The Black Ghosts, I Want Nothing

When it all gets too much, part 1

Baby baby, ain't it true?
I'm immortal when I'm with you
But I want a pistol in my hand
I want to go to a different land

- PJ Harvey, Big Exit

Ray on comedy

Any good executive can spot a cokehead. A great one can make him a Belushi.

- Ray Smuckles, Achewood

On the ultimate question thrown by Heidegger's Angst

I'll be laughing out loud
I'll be laughing with everyone I see
Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all.

- Neutral Milk Hotel, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

On the nature of the universe

There is a war on but it's... we're like ants on a battlefield, we haven't the heads to understand even a fraction of what's going on all around us. This whole universe is just... it's like a munitions factory. They make bombs here, Dane. We're just the end product of a factory process carried out by gigantic Manichaean intelligences. That's what it's all about: they're trying to perfect your soul, they're trying to make you like Buddha or Jesus because a perfected human soul is the ultimate weapon. That's what all of humanity's spiritual fucking aspirations amount to: the highest and best thing we can ever become is a bomb.

- The King-Of-All-Tears, under the guise of the future Dane McGowan,
from Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

London

- Of course London's a big place.
- It's a very big place, Mr Shadrack. A man could lose himself in London. Lose himself... lose himself... Lose himself in London!

- from Billy Liar, as sampled on St Etienne, You're In A Bad Way

Against capitalist pragmatism

The more sophisticated the rationalisation offered for patently sub-optimal circumstances, the more evil there is to hide. If something that strikes you as bad is presented as better than all the alternatives, then you know that evil is afoot because you are effectively being discouraged from asking how things got so bad in the first place.

- Steve Fuller, The Intellectual

Where were you when the fun stopped?

It was the death of fun, unreeling right in front of us, unraveling, withering, collapsing, draining away in the darkness like a handful of stolen mercury. Yep, the silver stuff goes suddenly, leaving only a glaze of poison on the skin.

- Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear

On being happy

You won't be happy with me,
But give me one more chance
You won't be happy anyway.

- The Magnetic Fields, 100,000 Fireflies

On the eidetics of recognition

Self-consciousness is in and for itself in and through the fact that it exists in and for itself for an other. That is, it exists only as recognized or acknowledged. The concept of this unity in its doubling, the infinity realizing itself in self-consciousness, is a many-sided intersection of and correlation between multiple and diverse meanings. Consequently its elements must, on the one hand, be precisely distinguished and kept separate, and on the other hand these must be taken as not different in their differentiation, or they must be taken and known in their opposite meaning. The double signification of the distinguished elements lies in the nature of self-consciousness to be infinite, or to be immediately the opposite of the determination in which it is posited. The exposition of this spiritual unity in its doubling will present the movement of recognition.

- G.W.F Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
(trans. Robert R. Williams)

On work

Some men here
they have a special interest
in your career - they want to help you to grow
and then siphon all your dough
why don't you find out for yourself?

- Morrissey, Why don't you find out for yourself

Re-embodiment

I could not get through September without a battle
I faced death
I went in with my arms swinging
but I heard my own breath
I had to face that I'm still living

I'm still flesh
I hold on to awful feelings

I'm not dead
there's no end
my face is red
my blood flows harshly

my heart beats loudly

my chest still draws breath
I hold it
I'm buoyant
there's no end

- The Microphones, The Glow, pt 2

This is it

I've got to take Jeremy's advice more often: I'm out on a date with a teenage goth, smoking pot in the Lazerbowl toilets... this is it. This is literally, it. This is the sort of thing people do when they're having a good time.

- Mark, Peep Show

Flux

There is nothing permanent except change.

- Heraclitus

On things we never said

Don't you ever ponder on things we never said?
Yes I did
But when we were kids
Now it's too late
Because we're dead.

- Slow Club, Because We're Dead

On struggle

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.

- Frederick Douglass

On speed

Speed is like a dozen transatlantic flights without ever getting off the plane. Timechange. You lose, you gain. Makes no difference so long as you keep taking the pills. But sooner or later you've got to get out because it's crashing and then all at once the frozen hours melt out through the nervous system and seep out through the pores.

- I/Marwood, Withnail & I

Maybe it's best that you're so so blind...

I know your heart can't grieve
What your eyes won't see
But you were my favorite moment
Of our dead century

- TV On The Radio, Dreams

The cheat codes for drugs

I think I've found the cheat codes for drugs. Then I can beat the end one.

- Anonymous