The Business that Stalketh about in the Dark will come on Saint Oblivious Day.
-Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Friday, January 18, 2019
If you think that only which is your own to be your own, and if you think that what is another's, as it really is, belongs to another, no man will ever compel you, no man will hinder you, you will never blame any man, you will accuse no man, you will do nothing involuntarily, no man will harm you, you will have no enemy, for you will not suffer any harm.
-Epictetus, The Handbook
-Epictetus, The Handbook
Monday, October 1, 2018
Monday, February 26, 2018
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
that's how it's supposed to be from the beginning
Children come to displace. They live on the earth after you are gone, and forget you. It's not their fault.
-Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist
-Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist
Saturday, October 26, 2013
the following day, no one died
Nothing is ever perfect, however, for alongside those who laugh, there will always be others who weep, and sometimes for the self-same reasons.
One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.
Words move, they change from one day to the next, they are as unstable as shadows, are themselves shadows, which both are and have ceased to be, soap bubbles, shells in which one can barely hear a whisper, mere tree stumps.
Life is an orchestra which is always playing, in tune or out, a titanic that is always sinking and always rising to the surface.
Prudence only serves to postpone the inevitable, sooner or later, it surrenders.
Dissonance also has a role to play in music.
It wasn't true what the proverb said, that what the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't grieve over. Proverbs are so deceiving.
-José Saramago, Death with Interruptions
One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.
Words move, they change from one day to the next, they are as unstable as shadows, are themselves shadows, which both are and have ceased to be, soap bubbles, shells in which one can barely hear a whisper, mere tree stumps.
Life is an orchestra which is always playing, in tune or out, a titanic that is always sinking and always rising to the surface.
Prudence only serves to postpone the inevitable, sooner or later, it surrenders.
Dissonance also has a role to play in music.
It wasn't true what the proverb said, that what the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't grieve over. Proverbs are so deceiving.
-José Saramago, Death with Interruptions
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
stop that thinking, boy!
An idea is a long suppressed lust. Those who get ideas are the most dangerous people in the world because they are ready to take the risk. They just want to see what happens; their thinking goes no further.
-Andri Snaer Magnason, LoveStar
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
he does credit Pascal
The sole cause of Man’s unhappiness is his inability to sit quietly in his room.
If I can make things seem fun, then maybe they’ll be fun.
-Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love
If I can make things seem fun, then maybe they’ll be fun.
-Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love
Thursday, November 15, 2012
three from the dark side
Sometimes the truth is so perfect that it leaves you speechless, simply because there is nothing to be added or subtracted, nothing to do but admire its terrible beauty even as it rips out your still-beating heart and sterilizes the bleeding cavity.
People can get used to anything .... If you do something often enough and for long enough, no matter how trivial or painful or useless or self-defeating or just plain stupid, it changes you. It becomes part of you, part of who you are, and you keep doing it, because that's who you are now.
Utopias are delicious! Taste like chicken.
-J. Stanton, The Gnoll Credo
People can get used to anything .... If you do something often enough and for long enough, no matter how trivial or painful or useless or self-defeating or just plain stupid, it changes you. It becomes part of you, part of who you are, and you keep doing it, because that's who you are now.
Utopias are delicious! Taste like chicken.
-J. Stanton, The Gnoll Credo
Monday, October 22, 2012
contrariwise
Nobody falls in love under normal circumstances. Love isn't in the category of normal things.
-Tim Powers, "A Soul in a Bottle" and "The Hour of Babel," The Bible Repairman and Other Stories
Monday, October 15, 2012
Sunday, September 16, 2012
I have proven that many times in my life
Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin.
-Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
-Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
Thursday, March 8, 2012
not an aphorism, but true
Continuously, unnoticeably, at the rate of one second per second, the world turned from what it had been and into what it was to be.
-John Crowley, The Solitudes
-John Crowley, The Solitudes
forrest was wrong
Reality is like a fruitcake: Pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface.
-A. Lee Martinez, Gil's All Fright Diner
-A. Lee Martinez, Gil's All Fright Diner
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
point and pointlessness
You love life because life's all there is. There's no god and that's his only commandment.
All paradigm shifts answer the amoral craving for novelty.... Good and evil are irrelevant. Show us the world's not the way we thought it was and a part of us rejoices.
There's a reason humans peg-out around eight: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it's really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect.
The point of civilisation is so that one can check in to a quality hotel.
Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.
Every now and then you look out at the world and know its gods have gone utterly elsewhere.
Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.
Modernity having done away with Absolute Moral Values and Objective Reality, there's only beauty left. What theory won't we espouse if it's beautiful? What atrocity won't we excuse?
All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself.
It's one of the Platonic forms, lying with someone on a hotel bed after transcendent sex.
No point saying pigs can't fly when they're up there catching pigeons.
What is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion?
Money's not legal tender in the moral world.
In the daylight the city's all brash bounce, no question of not going on. Nights you feel the exhaustion, see the going on for what it is: terror of admitting the whole thing's been a mistake.
The whole of one's being reduces to listening for the sound of a ringing phone.
This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: When will I see her again? What shall we do today? Do you like these shoes?
-Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
All paradigm shifts answer the amoral craving for novelty.... Good and evil are irrelevant. Show us the world's not the way we thought it was and a part of us rejoices.
There's a reason humans peg-out around eight: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it's really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect.
The point of civilisation is so that one can check in to a quality hotel.
Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.
Every now and then you look out at the world and know its gods have gone utterly elsewhere.
Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.
Modernity having done away with Absolute Moral Values and Objective Reality, there's only beauty left. What theory won't we espouse if it's beautiful? What atrocity won't we excuse?
All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself.
It's one of the Platonic forms, lying with someone on a hotel bed after transcendent sex.
No point saying pigs can't fly when they're up there catching pigeons.
What is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion?
Money's not legal tender in the moral world.
In the daylight the city's all brash bounce, no question of not going on. Nights you feel the exhaustion, see the going on for what it is: terror of admitting the whole thing's been a mistake.
The whole of one's being reduces to listening for the sound of a ringing phone.
This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: When will I see her again? What shall we do today? Do you like these shoes?
-Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
Saturday, July 2, 2011
the interconnectedness of all things
It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesman in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual. Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins.
-Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
-Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Monday, May 10, 2010
sound, love, religion, and clowns
Peter Høeg, The Quiet Girl
translated by Nadia Christensen
When one is sixty-five and falls in love it must be the same as when one was fifteen.
The good thing about having reached the bottom is that you can't fall any farther.
Alcohol is a violin; it's impossible to leave it alone.
If one could attach electrodes and draw energy directly from children, one could make a fortune.
Happiness doesn't consist so much of what one has scraped together and gotten off the ground, but of what one has been able to let go of.
The Divine is partial to saunas.
One can't pray for something. At least not for different musical notes. One can only ask to play as well as possible the notes one is given.
In periods of depression it is important to hold on to one's healthy leisure-time interests.
The problem with anger against God is that it's impossible to go higher in the system to complain.
When people make promises it's always with only a percentage of themselves... There is never more than 10 percent of the total persona behind the golden promises, because that is as much of ourselves as we control.
Night is not a time of day, night is not an intensity of light; night is a sound.
Do we ever hear anything other than our own monstrous ego and the immense filter of our personality?
It's unfortunate. To be forty-two. And the only way out is still to call your father.
It may well be that liquor doesn't work as deeply as heartfelt prayer. But it works just as quickly.
Part of the secret of love is concentration and setting voluntary limits.
Hell: it's not a place. Hell is transportable. All of us carry it around with us. It opens up and stays with us from the moment we lose contact with our own natural sympathy.
There are many people who believe they have bought a ticket to Gilbert and Sullivan in this life. And only when it's almost too late do they discover that existence is a piece of doomsday music by Schnittke instead.
God hears everything. But He doesn't testify in municipal court.
Evil is not necessary; it's a tumor; it can be removed.
No matter how close people get, they never reach each other.
Femininity is an ocean; even if one has both a life jacket and a preserver, the risk of drowning is overwhelming.
When you have reached the age of forty-two, you live an ever greater part of your life in memories.
True freedom is freedom from having to choose, because everything is perfect just as it is.
The con man in each of us adores the Internet. But to go from there to the point of abandoning natural dignity to acquaint oneself with how a computer works is still quite a leap.
Every man who shaves wishes a woman would watch and evaluate the result.
We all try to camouflage the monotony. But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When we're so much like one another anyway.
A great egotist is a great sinner. Great sinners have the opportunity for great remorse. Remorse is a springboard.
Half of all anger is directed inward at oneself.
Perhaps each of us is not just one person but an endless series of unique constellations in the present.
Forgiveness isn't charged with emotion; it's a matter of sound common sense. It occurs when you realize that the other person could not have acted otherwise. And that you could not have acted differently either. Very few of us have a real choice in decisive situations.
Prayer is a raft that ferries us safely through divorces, through drunken sprees, psychedelic mushroom trips, grade-three interrogations, and even through death, they say. Prayer and love.
Reality is created by compromises. That's what human beings can tolerate.
Without training in the ring, without five thousand nights with two thousand people who don't give up at the doors, it's hard to have the last word with a clown.
If you are driving 250 miles an hour with SheAlmighty and you grab hold of roadside trees to pick fruit, there's a considerable likelihood that your arm will be torn off.
translated by Nadia Christensen
When one is sixty-five and falls in love it must be the same as when one was fifteen.
The good thing about having reached the bottom is that you can't fall any farther.
Alcohol is a violin; it's impossible to leave it alone.
If one could attach electrodes and draw energy directly from children, one could make a fortune.
Happiness doesn't consist so much of what one has scraped together and gotten off the ground, but of what one has been able to let go of.
The Divine is partial to saunas.
One can't pray for something. At least not for different musical notes. One can only ask to play as well as possible the notes one is given.
In periods of depression it is important to hold on to one's healthy leisure-time interests.
The problem with anger against God is that it's impossible to go higher in the system to complain.
When people make promises it's always with only a percentage of themselves... There is never more than 10 percent of the total persona behind the golden promises, because that is as much of ourselves as we control.
Night is not a time of day, night is not an intensity of light; night is a sound.
Do we ever hear anything other than our own monstrous ego and the immense filter of our personality?
It's unfortunate. To be forty-two. And the only way out is still to call your father.
It may well be that liquor doesn't work as deeply as heartfelt prayer. But it works just as quickly.
Part of the secret of love is concentration and setting voluntary limits.
Hell: it's not a place. Hell is transportable. All of us carry it around with us. It opens up and stays with us from the moment we lose contact with our own natural sympathy.
There are many people who believe they have bought a ticket to Gilbert and Sullivan in this life. And only when it's almost too late do they discover that existence is a piece of doomsday music by Schnittke instead.
God hears everything. But He doesn't testify in municipal court.
Evil is not necessary; it's a tumor; it can be removed.
No matter how close people get, they never reach each other.
Femininity is an ocean; even if one has both a life jacket and a preserver, the risk of drowning is overwhelming.
When you have reached the age of forty-two, you live an ever greater part of your life in memories.
True freedom is freedom from having to choose, because everything is perfect just as it is.
The con man in each of us adores the Internet. But to go from there to the point of abandoning natural dignity to acquaint oneself with how a computer works is still quite a leap.
Every man who shaves wishes a woman would watch and evaluate the result.
We all try to camouflage the monotony. But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When we're so much like one another anyway.
A great egotist is a great sinner. Great sinners have the opportunity for great remorse. Remorse is a springboard.
Half of all anger is directed inward at oneself.
Perhaps each of us is not just one person but an endless series of unique constellations in the present.
Forgiveness isn't charged with emotion; it's a matter of sound common sense. It occurs when you realize that the other person could not have acted otherwise. And that you could not have acted differently either. Very few of us have a real choice in decisive situations.
Prayer is a raft that ferries us safely through divorces, through drunken sprees, psychedelic mushroom trips, grade-three interrogations, and even through death, they say. Prayer and love.
Reality is created by compromises. That's what human beings can tolerate.
Without training in the ring, without five thousand nights with two thousand people who don't give up at the doors, it's hard to have the last word with a clown.
If you are driving 250 miles an hour with SheAlmighty and you grab hold of roadside trees to pick fruit, there's a considerable likelihood that your arm will be torn off.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
