Close, Loud

"Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living."

        - Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The Dodo Effect

"Everybody has won and all must have prizes."
     - Lewis Carrol, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Starting Point

'In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.'

     -Wikipedia, on existentialism

Warring Ideals

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.  One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

     - W.E.B. De Bois, The Souls of Black Folks

Treasure Hunt

"I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit."

"Perhaps it hasn't one," Alice ventured to remark.

"Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess.  "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."

                         - Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Answer

"'The Answer to the Great Question . . . Of Life, the Universe and Everything . . . Is . . . Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm."

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

A Song of Contradiction

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself