David Vardeman

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”
― Tom Waits

“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“You’ve been wandering about Juarez like a zombie in a though experiment, an experiment in collective guilt, where the zombie is shown the morgue-slab photos, and responds by saying “I’m truly sorry”, and making out a check to Amnesty International, or Nuestra Hijas de Regreso a Casa, or maybe Save the Children or Habitat for Humanity, and then sealing the whole deal by forging his own signature. What’s that you say? You didn’t know it was forged? No wonder the authorities are beginning to get suspicious. We’re sorry to be the ones to break this to you, but the violence that man is doing to his home is not some sort of thought experiment, and the last thing on earth the world needs now is yet another anonymous onlooker, trying to get the picture; our drawing isn’t a drawing exactly, it’s more of a kind of framing device, and you, mon frère, so slow to get the picture, are not only under suspicion, but about to be framed. We didn’t exactly select you at random, and you’re not precisely The Viewer in the abstract sense, and we’re not about to give you a bird’s eye view of anything, or a view of Juarez from high atop a smelting stack; we’re about to put you back exactly where you belong, wearing Douchebag’s shoes, in the middle of the picture, because while Douchebag isn’t you in any literal sense, you appear to be standing in Douchebag shoes, and Douchebag, unfortunately, is now your problem.”
― Jim Gauer, Novel Explosives

“From p. 40 of Signet Edition of Thomas Wolfe's _You Can't Go Home Again_ (1940):

Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.

The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in bright air--these things will never change.

The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry--these things will always be the same.

All things belonging to the earth will never change--the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth--all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth--these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.

The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also never change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April.”
― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again