21 Grams

Cristina Peck: Katie could have lived. She’d be alive right now but that bastard left her there. Laying in the street. He left the three of them like animals. He didn’t care. She could be here with me. That son of a bitch is walking the streets, and I can’t even go into their room. I wanna kill him. I’m gonna kill Jack Jordan. I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch.

Paul Rivers: Slow down, just slow down.

Cristina Peck: Slow down. Slow down. While I what, huh? While I what?

Paul Rivers: Take it easy.

Cristina Peck: Take it easy? My husband and my little girls are dead, and I’m supposed to take it fucking easy? I can’t just go on with my life! I am paralyzed here! I am a fucking amputee! Do you see that? Who are you? You owe it to Michael. No, you’ve got his heart. You’re in house fucking his wife! And sitting in his chair! We have to kill him!

Paul Rivers: Not like this.

Cristina Peck: Then how? Tell me how! Katie died with red shoelaces on. She hated red shoelaces. And she kept asking me to get her some blue ones. And I never got her the blue ones. She was wearing those fucking red shoelaces when she was killed!

Hope

The heavens burned,
the stars cried out
and under the ashes of infinity
HOPE, scarred and bleeding,
breathed its last.

Ulatempa Poetess

To Be or Not To Be!

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. – Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Pleasure of Suffering

I wished to acquire the simplicity, native feelings, and virtues of savage life; to divest myself of the factitious habits, prejudices and imperfections of civilization…and to find, amidst the solitude and grandeur of the western wilds, more correct views of human nature and of the true interests of man. the season of snows was preferred, that I might experience the pleasure of suffering, and the novelty of danger.

Estwick Evans,
A Pedestrious Tour, of Four Thousand Miles,
Through the Western States and Territories,
During the Winter and Spring of 1818.

Love, Money, Fame

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, an obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. the hospitality was as cold as the ices.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden