Nuri Tardif

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I ask whether the mere eating of human flesh so very far exceeds in barbarity that custom which only a few years since was practised in enlightened England:—a convicted traitor, perhaps a man found guilty of honesty, patriotism, and suchlike heinous crimes, had his head lopped off with a huge axe, his bowels dragged out and thrown into a fire; while his body, carved into four quarters, was with his head exposed upon pikes, and permitted to rot and fester among the public haunts of men! The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth. His”
― Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life

“But I do feel strange-almost unearthly. I'll never get used to being alive. It's a mystery. Always startled to find I've survived.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“This is it

I’m not coming after you

I’m going to lie down for half an hour

This is it

I’m not going down

On your memory

I’m not rubbing my face in it anymore

I’m going to yawn

I’m going to stretch

I’m going to put a knitting needle

Up my nose

And poke out my brain

I don’t want to love you

For the rest of my life

I want your skin

To fall off my skin

I want my clamp

To release your clamp

I don’t want to live

With this tongue hanging out

And another filthy song

In the place

Of my baseball bat

This is it

I’m going to sleep now darling

Don’t try to stop me

I’m going to sleep

I’ll have a smooth face

And I’m going to drool

I’ll be asleep

Whether you love me or not

This is it

The new world order

Of wrinkles and bad breath

It’s not going to be

Like it was before

Eating you

With my eyes closed

Hoping you won’t get up

And go away

It’s going to be something else

Something worse

Something sillier

Something like this

Only shorter”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing