Mary Roach Quotes

Surreal can be exciting and good, and it can be like living inside an alien landscape, and it can be completely interesting, or you can be alienated from your own life - inside your own life, it doesn't feel familiar any more.

Every day after I wake up, I think, 'Wait... this can't be real; I'm still going to wake up.'

As a session player for so many years, I have found myself in rooms looking around going, 'Is this for real?'

Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.

I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?

Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more.

I can’t imagine what my school friends must have thought was going on because I was wandering around in some kind of dream. I felt as though my insides had been taken out which is, I now realize, the right feeling.

I feel like Alice falling into Wonderland. A line came to him: It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.

As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.

And when I was in the trunk, I saw Jesus. And the Virgin Mary. And Ozzy Osbourne.

If she possessed any memory whatsoever of the days when she'd been whole, her shattered recollections were scattered across the darkscape of her mind in fragments so minuscule that she could no more easily piece them together than she could gather from the beach all the tiny chips of broken seashells, worn to polished flakes by ages of relentless tides, and reassemble them into their original architectures.

Thinking of a series of dreams Where the time and the tempo fly And there's no exit in any direction 'Cept the one that you can't see with your eyes

Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does...The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph...Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

He reached up t0 grab one and came down with several, and they kept coming, washing over him, floating all around him. Never have tampon strings seemed so beautiful as they rolled up and down with the wind, landing on the ground and then twirling and floating up again, falling and rising and falling and rising.

The torches ran off, and I found myself in a forest, at night, without any light, on skis, and that was not fun - particularly because I was drunk. Luckily at some point I started to see the light of the ski lift. To be in the forest in the middle of the night, it's terrible.

As the smoke clears, I awaken, And untangle you from me. Would it make you feel better To watch me, while I bleed? All my windows still are broken, But I'm standing on my feet.

Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.

It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn’t matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.

Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.

I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.

I barely belong to this world, but still I'm participating.

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

Oh -- who's the Queen?" "Her, of course. The White Queen. You're just like Alice, you know. Down the rabbit hole with the Mad Hatter.

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.