Delirium Quotes

Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.

I said, I prefer the ocean when it's gray. Or not really gray. A pale, in-between color. It reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.

He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.

How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.
But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.
We are even free to choose the wrong thing.

This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors.

I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.

Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.

Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?"
"I don't know any other way."
"Let me show you."
And then we're kissing. Or at least, I think we're kissing—I've only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions. But this isn't like anything I've ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: this is like music or dancing but better than both.

I told you," he whispers back. I can feel his breath just tickling the space behind my ear, making my hair prick up on my neck. "I like you."
"You don't know me," I say quickly.
"I want to, though.

Mama, Mama, put me to bed
I won’t make it home, I’m already half-dead
I met an Invalid, and fell for his art
He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart.

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.

You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in the little silver bags, I mean.
It's looking out of the windows at the clouds, and thinking, maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay.
Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds, but it's just cold and wet and empty. But when you look out of a plane it's a special world... and I like that.

I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind. But his hands keep pulling me back: into the alley, and Portland, and a world that has suddenly stopped making sense.

That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

This is what I want. This is the only thing I've ever wanted. Everything else—every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss—has meant nothing.

Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes...

....love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is an enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake.

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.

I don't know. I had to be something, didn't I?

Everywhere he touches is fire. My whole body is burning up, the two of us becoming twin points of the same bright white flame.

They haven't killed us yet," I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it.
If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit.
This is the way the world is made now.

Delirium: You use that word so much. Responsibilities. Do you ever think about what that means? I mean, what does it mean to you? In your head?
Dream: Well, I use it to refer that area of existence over which I exert a certain amount of control or influence. In my case, the realm and action of dreaming.
Delirium: Hump. It's more than that. The things we do make echoes. S'pose, f'rinstance, you stop on a street corner and admire a brilliant fork of lightning--ZAP! Well for ages after people and things will stop on that very same corner, stare up at the sky. They wouldn't even know what they were looking for. Some of them might see a ghost bolt of lightning in the street. Some of them might even be killed by it. Our existence deforms the universe. THAT'S responsibility.

I love you. Remember. And someday, I will find you again.

I put my forehead on his collarbone, place one hand on his chest. Its rhythm reassures me: He is real, and he is now.

I know the rules. I've been living here longer than you have."
He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. "Hardly."
"Born and raised. You're a transplant." I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. "Country bumpkin!" I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing.
"City slicker," he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating.

His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent if we had ten thousand billion years.

The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love. In the morning mist, hazy and amorous, London was delirious. London squinted as it floated along, milky pink, without caring where it was going.

We'll walk together holding hands, and kiss in broad daylight, and love each other as much as we want to, and no one will ever try to keep up apart.

I wish I could close my eyes and be
blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind.

Do you know why I stopped being Delight, my brother? I do. There are things not in your book. There are paths outside this garden.

Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.

It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.

The idea—the fact of it, the fact that he even noticed and thought about me for more than one second—is huge and overwhelming, makes my legs go tingly and my hands feel numb.

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone.
You must hurt or be hurt.

Change. Change. Change. Change … change. Change. Chaaange. When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

Lord, help us root our feet to the earth
And our eyes to the road
And always remember the fallen angels
Who, attempting to soar,
Were seared instead by the sun and, wings melting,
Came crashing back to the sea.
Lord, help root my eyes to the earth
And stay my eyes to the road
So I may never stumble.
-Psalm 24 (From "Prayer and Study,"
The Book of Shhh
)

His eyes are the color of honey. These are the eyes I remember from my dreams.

Everything has taken on a strange, distant quality - the sounds of running and shouting outside get warped and weird like they're being filtered through water, and Alex looks miles away. I start to think I might be dreaming, or about to pass out.
And then I decide I'm
definitely
dreaming, because as I'm watching, Alex starts peeling his shirt off over his head.

Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you've forgotten the name of the person you're introducing them to as well?"
"No.

Because I think you're right. You can make a difference." He told me experiences were kind of like fate, and fate usually came in the form of a test. He told me fate liked to be worshiped. It liked to see us fall on out knees before it offered to help us up..." ♥

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me - such bullshit.

An immense body, encircling my delirium, a body made of wind and sunlight, crouching and stretching, encompassed the existence of the slightest human echo.

Everything looks stark and vivid and frozen, as though drawn precisely and outlined in ink - parents' smiles frozen, camera flashes blinding, mouths open and white teeth glinstening, dark glossy hair and deep blue sky and unrelenting light, everyone drowning in light - everything so clear and perfect I'm sure it must already be a memory, or a dream.

For all the people who have infected me with amor deliria nervosa in the past
- you know who you are.
For the people who will infect me in the future
- I can't wait to see who you'll be.
And in both cases:
Thank you.

Most things, even the greatest moments on earth, have their beginnings in something small. An earthquake that shatters a city might begin with a tremor, a tremble, a breath. Music begins with a vibration.

I like you.
You don't know me.
I want to, though.

The walls are covered -crammed- with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface.
Love.

Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge.

But what about me? I suffer, but still, I don’t live. I am x in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name. You are laughing- no, you are not laughing, you are angry again. You are forever angry, all you care about is intelligence, but I repeat again that I would give away all this superstellar life, all the ranks and honours, simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone and set candles at God’s shrine