(20 December 2004)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2004
Context: I'm not kidding, and I'm not being hyperbolic — sometimes I hate this thing I do more than I could ever say. Sometimes, it seems that I spend my days dragging people whose only crime is that I am their creator through the filth and pain and degradation of my own despicable imagination. Where is the good in this? Where is the resolution? Where is the sense of it? If I had even a scintilla of belief in a "higher" intelligence of any sort, days like yesterday (and, by extension, today) would, on the one hand, give me some degree of sympathy for the idiot dieties unable to craft a better universe, and, on the other hand, it makes me grateful I have no such beliefs, because the anger I would have for that "higher" whatever would be inexpressible. And I cannot imagine that there are actually people out there — self-professed "horror" writers — who are trying to elicit these emotions in others, who are purposefully driving their characters on through all the futile, dead-end nightmares that might be devised. I would not do this. I swear I would not do this, if I could find other words in me.
“For I hate, yet love thee, so,
That, whichever thing I show,
The plain truth will seem to be
A constrained hyperbole,
And the passion to proceed
More from a mistress than a weed.”
A Farewell to Tobacco (1805)
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Charles Lamb 85
English essayist 1775–1834Related quotes
To Lucasta: Going to the Wars, st. 3.
Lucasta (1649)
“It seemed to be pretty plain, that they had more of love than matrimony in them.”
Source: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Ch. 16.
“I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.”
To Lucasta: Going to the Wars, st. 3.
Lucasta (1649)
Context: Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.