Funhouse Quotes

Forever"

by Logan Keeley

October 18, 20xx




Lying beside me in the failure of flesh,

You wait for the words that will let your mind rest,

But I've already left you - I'm inside this song,

I'm chasing the rhythms that split right from wrong,

Forming chords on your shoulder, tracing notes on your hips,

I can't hear your thoughts as they fall from your lips, and


Every day I give away

A piece of me all torn and frayed -

What I can't keep, I sell for cheap,

Til nothing's left for you and me -



Chorus:

How can so much love feel like nothing at all?

How can so much nothing leave me dying to crawl

To the foot of your bed,

I should be with you - instead,

I walk away, stumbling, waiting, always waiting to fall.


When you look in my eyes, can you see I'm not there,

Just skin over bones and this flesh that I bear,

And there's no room for you, and you know I can never

Get out of myself, get over myself,

For even one moment, much less for forever.



They all take their shares and they all think they see

This stranger inside who pretends to be me.

They're a roomful of mirrors in this funhouse of fame,

I shrink and I grow, I am wild, I am tame,
< ~ Jeri Smith-Ready

If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.

They're right. It does.

However much you beg it to stop.

It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.

It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life...

All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.

Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.

Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.

And then the world turns...

And somebody falls off...

And oh God it's such a long way down.

Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller...

Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.

We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.

Trying to measure how far we have to fall.

No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives...

Wrappi ~ Alan Moore

I remember my brother as such a gentle and loving child, the best big brother a girl could hope for, but I remember when I started to sense our family's world tilting on its axis, the kaleidoscope turning, when things started to go wrong. From then on, it was like we were still ourselves, but our lives played out as though reflected back to us from a funhouse mirror. ~ Jessica Warman

like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse - they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted. ~ James Hannaham

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy. ~ Darin Strauss

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the 'moved' character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it's communication. ~ William L. Stull

Lionel turned his thoughts eagerly inward, to discover that inward was perilous, too; his soul was a sort of curved reflective surface that distorts, as in a funhouse mirror, the face of one peering into it. You might be anyone, any face. The face is mere skin. Accident. He seemed at such times to be approaching a profound yet unspeakable truth: that our identities are accidents. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

War was waged to make peace. Abuse was love. Welcome to the funhouse, where strange mirrors reflect the faces of hell. ~ Dean Koontz

During the interim, no matter how much agony the man may feel, he also experiences excitement, the excitement of learning how to cope with a closed society that reflects free society as a funhouse mirror reflects the human form: everything is there, but distorted. ~ Edward Bunker

One reason for not writing a lost-in-the-funhouse story is that either everybody's felt what Ambrose feels, in which case it goes without saying, or else no normal person feels such things, in which case Ambrose is a freak. ~ John Barth

Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society. ~ Bruce Sterling

The future is unwritten. Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society, reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in terrifying exaggerations. It doesn't matter who you are today, if you don't show up in that mirror you are just not going to matter very much. Our kids have to show up in the mirror. ~ Bruce Sterling

That doesn't sound like my Margo, she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors. ~ John Green

Today I saw a guy who looked like me in a funhouse mirror. He looked at me like, Hey, that's how I look reflected in the pond! ~ Dana Gould

When you lived in the funhouse, the laff riot just never stopped. ~ Stephen King

Here's the weird part: even when I was in the darkest and most despairing times of my depression, I still found depression funny. It was funny to me that the illness distorted my view of the real world like a funhouse mirror. It was funny that I could be immobilized by something that had no basis in a broken bone or bacteria or any tangible factor. And when other people, especially comedians and writers, shared their experiences with depression and those experiences were resonant with my own, I could laugh because we were all getting fooled together. I laughed in the same way an audience laughs at a particularly good trick pulled off by a magician. "We've all been deceived, but we don't know how! ~ John Moe

The one negative to horror is that it's always law of diminishing returns. When you go in the funhouse, the ride is never scary the second time. You will never have that pure experience as when you first watch it. ~ Eli Roth

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges' Funhouse or Sly Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of 'nostalgia'. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher's neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the ~ Mark Fisher

I'm trapped inside a funhouse whereby everything is skewed, and my center of gravity is thrown off by centrifugal force. ~ Mary Kubica

Lieutenant Governor Khan is the Governor in a funhouse mirror. He's short, rotund, and balding. I'm ~ Nat Kozinn

Where to start, Fitger thought. The department was a funhouse of dysfunctional characters. Academia was, traditionally, a refuge for the poorly socialized and the obsessive; but English, at Payne, had a higher percentage of crackpots than most. ~ Julie Schumacher

For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion. ~ John Barth

For whom is the Funhouse a house? ~ David Foster Wallace

Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn't tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn't fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror. ~ Haruki Murakami