phoenix.

“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”

—	Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Revolutionary Road

I read this book just after I left school, about 8 years ago and although I can remember passages it had very little impact on me at that time in my life. I picked my copy up again a couple of weeks ago and threw myself into it and have come out the otherside with a new addition to my notable pile.

I was just caught by the way Richard Yates writes, from the very first page... "He let the fingers of one hand splay out across the pocket of his shirt to show what a simple, physical thing the heart was..." through the argument that Frank & April Wheeler have in the middle of a street to having to pause, resting the book in my lap after being overwhelmed by reading the sentence "...and they fell asleep like children", on a train journey home.

The book was so hopeful, so contorted, so full of betrayal and grief, so well written and so honest.

Goosebumps.

Sorry 'bout the shakes at the beginning.

Listening to this song makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The lyric 'have I found you, flightless bird?' has lodged itself under my skin and keeps on repeating. Why? I know why, and it's the beauty of interpretation. I've taken from that lyric what I needed to, and gave my own inner monologue an outward voice. Over the past eight years, I've always written down lyrics or passages or quotes that refused to let me go, for whatever reason. I've got books, and books of them cluttering up the drawer space in my little room.
This will be the first enty of 2009.

Quotation....marks?

I've got this weird love/hate relationship with quotes.

There are some I read that articulate what I was trying to say with such clarity it's not only frustrating but blinding. Then, I just get annoyed that I didn't think to use the adjective in the first place. Why should one word win out over the other? What makes that particular word resonate?

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." Oscar Wilde said this, and I adore it but it ties in with my disdain for cliches. Cliches are such a wasteful way of saying something, it's like cheating your way around a sentence.

However, sometimes, something just throws itself at you and sticks.

"Don't let anyone, even your parents, break you. Find good people who care about you and surround yourself with just them. If you can't find them at first, find good music and fall into it, let it hold you until they come." As said by Davey Havok (don't worry, I had to Wikipedia him too). Someone told me this quote about three years ago, and it made so much noise inside my head that I never forgot it.

I guess the point of this late-night-ramble is that quotations are lyrics, just in a smaller box.