Facebook flog - Feb 5 2014

[blogfloggery.livejournal.com]

Link: Feb 5 2014, 1:28
Disclaimer: This blog entry is verbatim, as originally posted on LKH's Facebook. Copyright belongs to Ma Petite Enterprises.

It is only in the darkest of nights, at the moment when we know true despair, that our star shines brightest and leads us onwards, because when the sun shines and we are happy, we do not look for stars.
Laurell K. Hamilton

Comments

[lliira (from livejournal.com)]

I think the problem with people like this is that they're so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are. ~ John Cleese

[deadsong.livejournal.com]

"I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it." - Edith Sitwell

I'd love to see people just start posting things like these quotes to Facebook with no other comment. (Not that I'm advocating doing it--that'd be promoting harassment, etc. But I'd still love to see it.)

[jessica collett (from livejournal.com)]

'The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits' - Albert Einstein.

There are many things Anita Blake and Merry Gentry need. Limits is but one of them.

[foxfire74.livejournal.com]

Topical cream is another.

[jeza-red.livejournal.com]

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. - William Shakespeare

Can someone tell her that?

[txvoodoo.livejournal.com]

"Once upon a time, I, too, was a 13 year old girl." txvoodoo

;)

[dagonista.livejournal.com]

"What is this shit?" ~ Naomi Clark, 2014

[dwg.livejournal.com]

...but the sun is a star. These things are not opposites.

I know I'm being weirdly literal but I just can't get past this.

And if I think about the whole shining light leading us out of ~~~dark despair omg~~~ I just get angry.

[plastraa.livejournal.com]

Yep...absolutely zero stars on sunny bright sun filled days filled with sunshine and brightness and sun...oh, wait the sun is a what? A star you say? Oh. Never mind.

;)

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Which isn't to say that stars can't be romantic. Just ughhhhhhh everything about the sentiment grates me the wrong way -- they're all giant balls of gas in the vastness of space! Sunshine doesn't automatically equal happiness! And like you mention below, you can't always happy way your problems.

It would have been lovely to have a shining moment of the sky cracking open and light leading a way toward things that do not viciously suck in the last six months, or even last six weeks. But I'll take remembering to have breakfast or getting more than four hours sleep as a massive victory.

[plastraa.livejournal.com]

Making breakfast for the WIN! :) I agree. All these little 'when you're down just remember to make lemonade from your lemons and everything will be A-O.K.' bullshirt sayings really annoy me. heh

[deadsong.livejournal.com]

While being weirdly literal--she seems to forget the stars don't just go away when we can't see them.The light of our star happens to be so bright when we're facing directly into it that we can't see past it. The stars are still fucking there, right where they always are. They're not some magical thing that can only exist in the deepest darkness of her darkity night.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

And then there's the light still travelling across the cosmos from stars that have long since died. We can still see them burning bright, which is something I find infinitely more poetic/romantic than what she's saying here. The universe is so vast and we're only such a miniscule part of it, but we still get to witness things that have been swallowed up by time and may never be seen again.

I'll take that over all of LKH's sunny days.

[deadsong.livejournal.com]

Everything you just said x 1000. She's so busy trying to be deep that she misses the truly profound that exists around her--and entirely independent of her.

Then again, I suspect that's part of her problem. If it exists independent of her narcissism, she can't--or won't--see it.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

I suspect you're right.

[lliira (from livejournal.com)]

Plus a night with sparkling stars does not work as a metaphor for feeling bad in any way unless one is scared of the dark. I already strongly suspected that LKH was afraid of the dark from her books. Now I am sure of it.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

If we're to run with this metaphor in a semi-logical way, the night is the dark and full of monsters true despair but we all have a star that shines brightest. The night sky is full of stars, even if you're living in a city, which would mean everyone on the planet must be having extraordinarily shitty lives every single day. And there's no reprieve because night will inevitably fall again and again and again.

There are Dostoevsky novels that are less depressing than this.

[lliira (from livejournal.com)]

I've been trying to look at the metaphor in a semi-logical way and failing. Because when we are happy, we do look for stars. Stars are pretty and interesting and people like them. People are more likely to be attentive to the neat stuff in the cosmos when they don't feel like shit. Plus in the darkest night, you can't see the stars at all because the reason it's so dark is that it is cloudy, possibly storming.

I can't believe this woman makes a living writing. Or doing anything that involves thought at all.

[plastraa.livejournal.com]

She's back making quotes again. yay.

I do hate these platitude type quotes though. When I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis many years ago I got to hear them all...and they make me barf now as much as they did then. I am not of the opinion that you can happy away your problems, sometimes shit is still shitty. <---That should be a quote. :P

[cheeky-duckie.livejournal.com]

I am not of the opinion that you can happy away your problems, sometimes shit is still shitty.

This. I hate when people are like, "Man, your problem is a bummer. You should be happy instead."

[world-dancer.livejournal.com]

I didn't jump on the quote bus earlier, but I didn't realize how much she does it.

She clearly doesn't realize how narcissistic it is to quote herself.

[guardians-song.livejournal.com]

"Nope. Never showed up for me and certain other people I know. And when, in the midst of slightly better darkness, such a guiding light did appear, it was like a half-burnt-out, miserably-flickering old flashlight that someone had tossed into the pit for us, but we grabbed it desperately and forged on as best we could because THAT WAS ALL WE HAD.

"Pretentious ass. When you're in "true despair", anything RESEMBLING a light will do. You don't need your star to "shine brightest " - you're blessed lucky if it shines at all. If ANYTHING shines at all.

"How's that imminent deadline going, anyway?"

-Guardian's Song

[plastraa.livejournal.com]

"Hahahahaha!"

-----*--@ Plastraa @--*-----

[estllechauvelin.livejournal.com]

"We have more important things to do than stand around listening to you quote yourself."-1776, probably slightly paraphrased because I'm doing this off the top of my head.

[cherrypep.livejournal.com]

"Laurell may have a future in the greetings-card industry" -- me.

[dreamstrifer.livejournal.com]

Kinda ironic that it's super cloudy in the STL area today.... No sun and lots of snow.

[jamoche]

Cloudy in the San Francisco area too, and everyone's rejoicing - this is supposed to be when we get all our rain for the whole year and so far we're desperately short.

[tarawyn.livejournal.com]

Even ignoring the other fails... what is "our" star? (scientifically, that'd be the sun) And why, exactly, is it better than the sun? If it's some kind of guiding light, then I know I can see hella better where I'm going when there's the sun. Is it the North Star? That, at least, would make some sense... but saying the North Star is hella poetic. Why not just fucking say it? And it's not that no one looks for it, it's that the light-pollution blocks it out during the day.

[jeza-red.livejournal.com]

So basically she rewrote the R.W.Emerson's "When it is darkest, men see stars."

Oh, and Aristotele Onassis's "It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light."

And about dozen more quotes about darkness and stars...

Laurelita, the beauty of a good quote is that it's short and concise, yours.... are not.

[plastraa.livejournal.com]

I think she's just going through her bad poetry stage, I have a few notebooks of 'inspirational and deep' poems from around when I was 15 or so. She's a little late.