The Myth Of Sysiphus, Albert Camus

The Myth of Sysiphus, Albert Camus

"My life may find a meaning in it, but that is trifling. It ceases to be that exercise in detachment and passion which crowns the splendor and futility of a man’s life."

"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."

-Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion

William S. Burroughs, Naked lunch

"Writers talk about the sweet-sick smell of death whereas any junky can tell you that death has no smell … at the same time a smell that shuts off breath and stops blood … colorless no-smell of death … no one can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions and black blood filters of flesh … the death smell is unmistakably a smell and complete absence of smell … smell absence hits the nose first because all organic life has smell … stopping of smell is felt like darkness to the eyes, silence to the ears, stress and weightlessness to the balance and location sense … You always smell it and give it out for others to smell during junk withdrawal … A kicking junky can make a whole apartment unlivable with his death smell … but a good airing will stink the place up again so a body can breathe … You also smell it during one of those oil burner habits that suddenly starts jumping geometric like a topping forest fire … Cure is always: Let Go! Jump!"

Daisies (1966)

"When the Czech director Věra Chytilová made Daisies, her second feature, Czechoslovakia had endured nearly two decades of repressive Communist rule, and she was one of the leading voices in a new generation of filmmakers who expressed resistance through gestures of allegorical insubordination that were semantically slippery enough to possibly get by the censors. Similarly, the Maries operate like guerrilla insurgents across Prague, disguising their true intentions and refusing to dutifully submit their bodies for either labor or male gratification."

Christiane F. (1981)