The following may contain unmarked spoilers from various media, including but not limited to: Umineko When They Cry, The Beginner's Guide, Deltarune, House of Leaves, 1984, 17776, Nisemonogatari, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, The Truman Show, Bocchi the Rock, The Tatami Galaxy, Celeste, Doctor Who, Celeste, The Stanley Parable, It's Such a Beautiful Day, World of Tomorrow, Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion, Doki Doki Literature Club, RIBBIT, Ratatouille, WarGames, A Tale of Two Cities, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Blade Runner, Piranesi, and Shimeji Simulation.
Art Reduced to Personal Expression
— [omitted]
If you find yourself speaking with a person who does not make sense, in all likelihood, that person is not real.
— The Stanley Parable
Two people could engage in actions that would make it appear as though a conversation was occurring, and nobody would have any way of knowing whether or not accurate conversation occurred.
— Shamisen
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.
— Abraham Lincoln
The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free.
— Audre Lorde
Only this one holy medium brings me peace of mind.
— Adam Jones
How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness.
— Hugo Ball
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
— George Orwell
You know how you're not seeing the star as it is, right now? Like you're seeing it light years in the past, and that's how long it took for light to reach us—that's what it's like with stand-up comedy. I talk about things like they happened recently; but in real life, I've completely imploded.
— Gianmarco Soresi
Hatred is a beginner emotion.
— Gülce
In each location, the inhabitants are given access to food, but the utensils are too unwieldy to serve oneself with. In hell, the people cannot cooperate, and consequently starve. In heaven, the diners feed one another across the table and are sated.
— Wikipedia
I just listen to what my brain says
I don't know if it's really me
— Edward Skeletrix
Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
— Walter Benjamin
Fear and love are right next to each other in the brain. Most humans can’t really tell the difference! In fact, I’m not sure there is a difference!
— Bill Cipher
I believe myself to be always acting within reasonal boundaries of sanity.
— Itsuki Koizumi
There has always been this question: Is the audience getting dumber? Or are we filmmakers patronizing them? Is this what they want? Or is this what we're giving them? But the public went to my film in large numbers. And that has to be encouraging.
— Peter Weir
Love you bastards! Motherfu—!
— Hiroi Kikuri
Ain't no better story than one told with sparkling eyes. Doubt, irony, that's what poisons your story... That, and too much predictability.
— Old Man
If you grew up rotting away in front of your computer in self-isolation and that is your own "authentic experience", maybe a failed one, you will ultimately come to find that new sincerity has created therapyspeak and furthered the proliferation of self-help language. What is left but the soulless that claims to improve your life? The soap with a catchy name that works better than all the other soaps. Dada, Konata.
— Octa Möbius Sheffner
A professor's view: "It's the commentaries on Shakespeare that matter, not Shakespeare."
— Anton Chekhov
What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation? It looks like an additional monthly user.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky
People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else.
— Laurence Arne-Sayles
I'm in despair! The Internet has left me in despair!
— Itoshiki Nozomu
Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening. It is laundered pain, not a balancing of scales.
— Porpentine
personally, ive seen enough. it's like watching the earth orbit the sun and going like, "maybe this time it'll go in a square instead of an oval." nah.
— Juice
People letting ghosts govern most of they mental
— Lil Ugly Mane
You ever tried going mad without power? It's boring! No one listens to you!
— Russ Cargill
The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
— George Orwell
It's claustrophobic, yet I feel exposed.
— Madeline
...it's just, like, your brain doesn't know what else to do besides laugh, 'cause there's no other emotion that makes any sense at all.
— Jerma985
Because liking things is more fun than not liking things.
— CinemaWins
Woe to the blind that lead, woe to the blind that follow.
— Augustine of Hippo
What's real or isn't real doesn't matter here. The consequences are the same.
— Johnny Truant
In the game of patriarchy, women are not the opposing team. They are the ball.
— Anita Sarkeesian
In Walt's mind there was probably no difference; making it more realistic didn't mean make the physics and proportions more consistent with reality, but rather, make the idea or essence of the action more apparent and real.
— Alan Becker
There's no devil on one shoulder and angel on the other
They're just two normal people
— Will Toledo
We become what we behold: we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
— John M. Culkin
Love Is A Many Razor Bladed Thing
— Doopees
Except now hes built up a tolerance. Not against the pain, but against the relief. His own brain pathways have abandoned him and left him to suffer. Direct confrontation with suffering now fails. He can only run now
— wholelottared
Hell is other people.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
In its deliberate attempt to be real, it's more real than the real thing.
— Deishuu Kaiki
Made with all the love I'm legally allowed to give!
— Bubble
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
— Roy Batty
Your inability to divorce yourself from the internet is why you are the butt of the joke.
— Lil Ugly Mane
You're always the main character of your own life, right? Why are you acting like a supporting actor? ...You have to get up on the stage yourself without being pushed.
— Ushiromiya Jessica
Even after my senses returned, I still feel the melody lingering in the deepest reaches of my heart.
It expands to every corner of my body, and before long, becomes an inseparable part of me.
— Shijima Tsukishima
And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.
— Zampanò
I don't think I'm sick, I think I'm the only person who can see the sickness. I'm the damn doctor.
— Northernlion
There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see
— Jordan B. Peterson
The past inside the present.
— Boards of Canada
It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
— Brian Eno
When you thoroughly investigate game theory, it boils down to math. Do you know what the weak point of math is? ...It's noise.
— Ushiromiya Kyrie
Can we just pretend, just a little bit between the two of us, that the world isn't fucking terrible?
— Jelly
The Divine are unobserved and the Unobserved are divine.
Unearthly beings described by man reside in that place unseen.
— J. Robert Oppenheimer
For some reason, human failings are very endearing in an animal.
— Jim Davis
The "discourse" around problematic fiction and fantasy is beyond infuriating. The way people act about it is infantile at best. It is not about protecting victims. It is not about protecting children or women. It's about cheap popularity contests and bloating their own ego. It is truly disgusting.
— MATRIARDIST
Like you can't see a bigger picture without a caption
— Lil Ugly Mane
If there was an answer, a meaning, would it make you any happier?
— Coda
People associate evil with darkness. But that is not accurate: It is easy to look into the dark; it is very hard to stare into bright light.
— Dennis Prager
It's easy. Bully them horribly, even if it's just for a short time. Then suddenly stop and give them power. If you do that, then no matter who it is, they'll be reborn as a mighty bully. Even if you only bully them for about three days, you'll get them to believe that they're still a bullied kid for a hundred million times longer than that, and they'll reign as the mightiest of bullies.
— Lambdadelta
Used to talk to myself, I told him "Shut the fuck up"
— MF DOOM
This is me! This is the shape that lets others recognize me as myself.
— Shinji Ikari
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
— Abraham Maslow
I distinctly recall hearing the music playing at the dentist. It was a proto-"this is an unpleasant place to be, no one likes it here, so we’re gonna put on soft rock" situation. But the unavoidable, grizzly truth of your skull cavity vibrating as your teeth are cleaned—or worse, extracted—always enters the fray.
— Daniel Lopatin
All I've Gotta Do Is Be Here Breathing
— Kale
It cannot be, my child; there is no Time there, and no trouble there.
— Sydney Carton
The Greg is above all, self loathing. The Greg knows deep down that he is not all that different from the Fregley, and this haunts the Greg.
— beefkiss
But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
— David Foster Wallace
Life Changing Moments Seem Minor in Pictures
— C418
I took a look at my thoughts, my appearance, my expressions, my mannerisms and idiosyncrasies and didn't like them. So I stripped myself down, chucked things out and replaced them with a completely new personality. When I heard someone say something intelligent. I used it later as if it were my own. When I saw a quality in someone that I liked. I took it. I still do that. All the time. It's just like a car, man, replacing parts.
— David Bowie
When I'm lying in my bed, I think about life and I think about death, and neither one particularly appeals to me.
— Morrissey
You are not in combat with the people in front of you. Don't get it twisted who your enemies are.
— Kikuri Hiroi
Vivid Memories Turn to Fantasies
— Will Smith
The game is often played by children as a party game or on the playground. It is often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error, especially the inaccuracies as rumours or gossip spread, or, more generally, for the unreliability of typical human recollection.
— Wikipedia
Is being in your mind like walking a mental tight rope?
Let me push you off...
— Happy World Daddy
Where do you want it to be?
Who do you want to be?
Any place, so long as it will wrap itself around me gently!
Anyone, so long as I am treated kindly!
— Zepar and Furfur
You must accept that you are the person here, now, and that you cannot become anyone else other than that person. There is no such thing as that rose-colored campus life. Why? Because there is nothing rose-colored in this world.
— Seitaro Higuchi
He died in an explosion
Of mixed media, and poorly written reviews
— Will Toledo
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
— Dr. Seuss
And so, the all-knowing God has stepped in for the sake of Humans who cannot unlearn, marking out things that should be learned and things that should not be learned.
— Gertrude
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
— Damien Hirst
I like being only kinda sort of known about. I like making things that are difficult to get into, but rewarding for the few. It's a pleasant state to be in. If I ever make something very accessible and popular, I assure you it was a mistake and I'll be burning down every social media account I have.
— Behold, Maxine
From One Source All Things Depend
— Boards of Canada
And then? Facebook. Instagram. And now, just because you have a camera in your pocket you can't just take a picture anymore. You gotta take a picture next to a neon sign with some fake grass that says like "life's short, drink mimosas" and shit like that, and oh, that photograph's not good enough to be on my Instagram, I gotta delete that photo, and this photo—no I don't think I was looking right in that photo, can you take it from this side instead? And the more that these systems get built, and I think AI is just the next level of this, the less human we become because all the imperfections get sanded off in favor of some kind of like, curated farce, that is not a representation of what it means to be alive on planet Earth. I consider it an affront to the human spirit!
— Ryan Letorneau
Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only God’s echoes and God is Narcissus.
— Hanson Edwin Rose
Rock resonates as the music of the perpetual underdog. Is it really rock if it's sung by life's winners?
— Ryo Yamada
The act of pissing has important connotations that have to do with power. More in the case of men, whose act is a kind of challenge. It involves holding your penis and pointing it outward, exhibiting the most private part of the male body, and doing it without qualms. Just showing off. Here I have something powerful, a symbol of my machismo. Let me show it to you, the proof of my virility and power as a man. Even when a small, naked child takes his little instrument, arching his back, and points it, there is something impudent about it. We need only look at the famous Manneken Pis, to get the sense of impish shamelessness. It is charming in a child, but in a grown man, it is much more than that. The act, when done in public, becomes a sign of defiance. And when the piss is directed toward someone or something, it says: "Hey, see, I do it on you because you are of the same quality as the piss. You are disposable, worthless, like piss." To piss on someone is to humiliate him or her, to crush the ego, to put him or her in the proper place, a subservient place, a place of inferiority. It is almost like saying: "You’re shit!"
— Jorge J. E. Gracia
You desperately need something and I cannot give it to you. I literally do not have it.
— Coda
Even if the tale of the gods doesn't mention us, we are always the main character in the story we write for ourselves. Becoming aware of that fact is the first thing that separates witches from humans.
— Furudo Erika
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
— Carl Sagan
If something seems unreasonable, it is because you are doing it wrong! Always assume the maker is competent and has good intentions
— Kalemandu
So many voices. Not that I'm unfamiliar with voices. A rattle of opinion, need and compulsion but masking what?
— Johnny Truant
If you skipped class for that long, it'd mean your "death" socially. ...After being dead that long, not only would you be unable to catch up on all you missed in the world at large, you'd also lose any motivation you might've had when you left. ...So, even though you'd be alive, it'd be fair to say that you'd died once. You would never again...be able to regain the self that you once were. It would never come back to life.
— Ushiromiya Ange
I just felt so strongly that if I could have connected with him, that if I could have somehow made his work my own, that I would finally be once-and-for-all happy. I needed to see myself in someone else. I needed to be someone other than me.
— Davey Wreden
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.
— Louis L'Amour
How frozen I became and powerless then,
Ask it not, Reader, for I write it not,
Because all language would be insufficient.
I did not die, and I alive remained not;
Think for thyself now, hast thou aught of wit,
What I became, being of both deprived.
— Dante
I told myself just yesterday that sayings set you free,
But it's hard to see upon untrusty words, you see
— Vasili Igor
But a poem is never actually finished. It just stops moving.
— Sayori
Shame is a prison with unlocked doors and no guards.
— gwenisonline
Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war, dammit, I stand here and I can't believe it!
— Guy Montag
There's this emperor, and he asks the shepherd's boy how many seconds in eternity. And the shepherd's boy says, "There's this mountain of pure diamond. It takes an hour to climb it and an hour to go around it, and every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain. And when the entire mountain is chiseled away, the first second of eternity will have passed." You may think that's a hell of a long time. Personally, I think that's a hell of a bird.
— The Twelfth Doctor
In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.
— Andy Warhol
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.
— Edvard Munch
Unfortunately, "accustomed to" here is really synonymous with "damaged by."
— Zampanò
Abandoning your uniqueness is equivalent to dying. So don't write generic lyrics based on other concerns.
— Ryo Yamada
I don't know how deep the hole goes, but if it goes all the way to the center of the earth, then it's probably a long enough fall for me to regret it, recall how my life went, and renew my resolve to die.
— Shijima Tsukishima
It is impossible to outrun your own reflection.
— Celeste
No one walks through life unscathed, and it’s how we react to being tested that becomes our legacy.
— Emigh Cannaday
It might not connect with too many people, but those it does, it'll hit deeply.
— Ryo Yamada
Waiting for something to happen?
— Mewo
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.
— Anton Ego
90% of the problem with twitter is treating fictional people like they're real and real people like they're fictional
— Alex Hirsch
All good art is political! There is none that isn't. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, "We love the status quo."
— Toni Morrison
What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unmourned, well, you get the drift.
As a counselor once told me—a Counselor For Disaffected Youth, I might add: "You like that crap because it reminds you of you."
— Johnny Truant
In my attempts to escape boredom, I've torn apart and eaten the guts of as many games and tales as there are stars in the sky. But always, my relief from boredom is short-lived. It's all so fleeting that I've started to ignore each tale as an individual story.
— Hachijo Ikuko
More. More more more. More love, more praise, more people telling me that I'm good, always more more more... It's like a disease. Solution, solution, solution.
— Davey Wreden
By objectively, you mean from your viewpoint, right?
— Ushiromia Maria
We are heading forwards. That's how it always is. We aren't going back or turning left or right. Everything progresses in a linear fashion. To the next character, to the next sentence, to the next page.
The moment we step forward, the previous page disappears. But fear not. We have the next page in front of us. There is an infinite amount of them.
— Yomikawa
People from healthy families—they're out there. Laughing with their friends. But no, not you: you needed a professional.
— Gianmarco Soresi
I’m always in the audience, and that’ll never go away. If it does, that means music will truly become some sort of job. I want to selfishly be there and engage with it.
— Oneohtrix Point Never
Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
Well, I notice that you could use some of the letters in this comic to spell "Hitler was right." So I assume that's your main point.
— Shenanigansen
I would posit an even simpler version: A true adherent to Pascal’s Wager should never leave their house because they could potentially be attacked on the street. By simply accepting the cost of living in complete isolation, they can prevent their own violent death!
— SwordsSwordsSwords
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?
— WOPR
Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying.
— Dr. Seuss
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy
In the past, humans called the limits of their knowledge... no, ignorance itself, magic.
— Virgilia
In Part 2 of the experiment, the same three groups of dogs were tested in a shuttle-box apparatus (a chamber containing two rectangular compartments divided by a barrier a few inches high). All of the dogs could escape shocks on one side of the box by jumping over a low partition to the other side. The dogs in Groups 1 and 2 quickly learned this task and escaped the shock. Most of the Group 3 dogs—which had previously learned that nothing they did had any effect on shocks—simply lay down passively and whined when they were shocked.
— Wikipedia
The axe forgets what the tree remembers.
— African Proverb
This is torture for you!! Someday you'll surrender to me and give up! Until then, you'll be tortured over and over again!
— Ushiromiya Battler
Bill read in a biology book about how cells replace themselves over the years; how bodies died and were remade out of interchangeable pieces. It depressed him how foreign his younger self looked to him now, how his body had stolen the identity of this happy dead kid, and with his own life, had made a complete mess of it.
— Don Hertzfeldt
Is it possible to love something so much, you imagine it wants to destroy you only because it has denied you?
— Zampanò
We were all in it together, though. Every stranger you ever met, they were fighting the very same fight you were. Of course, you didn't talk about it with them, but all of us saw that terror, the terror any mortal person has. That terror wasn't natural. No other creature in the universe woke up every morning knowing it was guaranteed to die one day. Just us. Nobody should have to live with that. It's too much, it isn't right. No one ever should have had to bear it.
— Jason Durabo
I can do no wrong, for I do not know what it is.
— Satan
You can't talk yourself out of loneliness, it doesn't work that way. You can't be the one writing both the questions and the answers, then there's no movement! Then there's no circulation!
— Davey Wreden
Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.
— George Orwell
I get irrationally annoyed whenever someone says something along the lines of "It isn't perfect, no [piece of artform] is". Its a nothing statement that reduces art to a stepping stone towards some sisyphean task of trying to find the best ever [thing] instead of caring in what it has to say or does
— KiyoshiWJ
Death is not a destination. It is the absence of one.
— Don Hertzfeldt
If being cool means to feign disinterest over the simple things, there's an alternate term for that, and it's called being miserable.
— Prince Noyno
They say truth stands the test of time. I can think of no greater comfort than knowing this document failed such a test.
— Zampanò
Art is the emanation of Man, Man the Emanation of Nature, God the Grandfather of Art.
— SCP-2614
...it's basically like showing yourself masturbating to other people! I couldn't stand that.
— Masaki Jogasaki
When your heart's on fire, you must realize
Smoke gets in your eyes
— Otto Harbach
Every time I wake up from a dream, my chest is pierced with a sharp feeling of loneliness.
— Shijima Tsukishima
It should be antidepression
As a friend of mine suggested
Because it's not the sadness that hurts you
It's the brain's reaction against it
— Will Toledo
Tree metaphors breathe life into all sorts of things.
Blood vessels and nerves connect in dendrite shapes to distribute energy.
Like composition becoming life.
Strength, knowledge, thought... they stand living against gravity through equal geometries.
Life is beautiful... that is why beautiful girls read books.
— Yomikawa
It is the pinnacle of all human emotion. More passionate than hope, much deeper than despair. Love.
— Akemi Homura
Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me.
— Salman Rushdie
Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.
— Emily
Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.
— Mark Z. Danielewski
To know everything is to die.
— Louis Zukofsky