December 2010
6 posts
“Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole...”
– Otto von Bismarck.
“The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a...”
– John Rae.
“[W]hat’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does...”
– Mantel, Hillary. Wolf Hall. New York: Picador, 2009. 36.
“He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray, wrinkled vastness,...”
– Mantel, Hillary. Wolf Hall. New York: Picador, 2009. 15.
“We no longer reveal totality within ourselves by lightning flashes. We approach...”
– Edouard Glissant
“Birds sing after a storm. Why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in...”
– Rose Kennedy.
November 2010
2 posts
“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to...”
– Buckminster Fuller
“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in proportion.”
– Francis Bacon.
June 2010
1 post
“She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist...”
– Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God.
April 2010
1 post
March 2010
1 post
“It is observed that the red-haired of both sexes are more libidinous and...”
– Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels.
Everything I've ever done lives inside of me with...
gatekeeper:
(via coincident)
I love this.
February 2010
3 posts
From The Names by Don DeLillo:
I. “[‘Rockbound doubt’] was just there, or not there, something we knew about each other. The quasi-stellar object, the quantum event, these were the sources of our speculation and wonder. Our bones were made of material that came swimming across the galaxy from exploded stars. This knowledge was our shared prayer, our chant. The grim inexplicable was there, the god-mass...
One of the [Many] Reasons I Read Literary Theory...
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other…My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is ‘I desire you,’ and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other...
“God, how I still love private readers. It’s what we all used to be.”
– J. D. Salinger.
January 2010
9 posts
“A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail all...”
– George Orwell, 1946 (via wewillnotbeundersold).
“such great stretches of dreamscape
such lines of all too familiar lines
...”
– Cesaire, Aime. “Earthquake.” Trans. Paul Muldoon. The New Yorker. 25 January 2010.
“Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing…”
– Smith, Zadie. “Fail Better.” The Guardian. 13 January 2007.
“5. The mechanically reproduced object will have its aura restored in this Age of...”
– Two of Richard Nash’s ten predictions for the next ten years in publishing. The sort of thing I read way too late at night.
“And now they’re telling me religion is the only thing you could believe...”
– Excerpt from an interview (quite fascinating) with School of Divinity Professor J. Z. Smith (who incidentally has never used a computer) in The University of Chicago Maroon. What his students taught him—that “somehow beliefs isn’t thinking about,” that beliefs apply only to...
“‘Twas grad school, and the slithy gels
did gyre and gimble on the bench...”
– An awesome bastardization of Lewis Carroll on Neurotopia.
“Clear water in a brilliantbowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the...”
– Stevens, Wallace. “The Poems of Our Climate.”
December 2009
7 posts
“I have worn steep heels
and a dress too tight
I have pressed my life
against...”
– Noe Venable, “Woods Part of When.”
“He calls to me out of Seir, Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the...”
– Isaiah 21:11-12.
November 2009
5 posts
“Stars, hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
– Macbeth.
“The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from...”
– Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway.
“How true, for example, is that other old Fable of the Sphinx, who sat by the...”
– Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. Chaper II.
“And it’s about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do...”
– Smith, Zadie. White Teeth.
“I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to...”
– Foucault, Michel. “The Masked Philosopher.” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press, 1997. 323.
October 2009
2 posts
“As for the future, it cannot possibly shock us, since we have already done...”
– Saul Bellow.
September 2009
4 posts
“I believe, indeed, that our ancestors read too much and that our brains are a...”
– Valéry, Paul. “A Fond Note on Myth.”
“A thinker is one drawn, you may say seduced, by the authority of thinking, that...”
– Cavell, Stanley. “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant (Terms As Conditions).” In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. 28-29.
“The secret of the world is the tie between person and event…He thinks his...”
– Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Fate.”
“We are each of us celebrating some funeral.”
– Baudelaire.
August 2009
19 posts
“It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too...”
– Fowles, John. The Tree. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
“Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic...”
– Fowles, John. The Tree. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
"This Decade [I]s About the Personalization of the... →
“If we eventually decide that neuroenhancers work, and are basically safe, will we one day enforce their use? Lawmakers might compel certain workers—emergency-room doctors, air-traffic controllers—to take them. (Indeed, the Air Force already makes modafinil available to pilots embarking on long missions.) For the rest of us, the pressure will be subtler—that queasy feeling I get when I...
“I probed Retrieveless things
My Duplicate — to borrow —
A Haggard...”
– Dickinson, Emily.
“The nature of a Female Space is this: it shrinks the Organs Of Life till they become Finite & Itself seem Infinite And Satan vibrated in the immensity of the Space! Limited To those without but Infinite to those within…” -William Blake
“The woman writes as if the Devil was in her; and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth...
“Sometimes I think of you and feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on...”
– Winterson, Jeanette. Written On the Body.