January 2012
2 posts
“All I ever wanted was a good job, some bus fare and a rocket and a bomb.”
– Michael Knott, quoted by JM Blaine
“Masturbate frequently. You’ll probably do that anyway, but you may as well...”
– Anthony Neilson
December 2011
15 posts
“Every slum needs a laureate or it’s just slum.”
– notes
“What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit...”
– Haruki Murakami, quoted in The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
“A character is compelling when he’s becoming a junkie or trying to stop being a...”
– Nancy Franklin
“Look at it this way: humans have existed on this planet for roughly half a...”
– Jeffy Hot Seat
“Mythology does not hold as its greatest hero the merely virtuous man. Virtue is...”
– Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
“My being a poet probably has something to do with my preferring questions to...”
– Ben Lerner
“Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its...”
– Matthew 12:33-34
“Whereas the truths of science are communicable, being demonstrable hypotheses...”
– Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
“The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul,...”
– Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
“The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the...”
– Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
“You can spend your whole life
doing no more than preparing for life and...”
– Terrance Hayes
“Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,...”
– Matthew 6:26
“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
– Matthew 6:21
“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not...”
– Matthew 5:33-34
“Skin—that smooth, plump, sweetly fragrant sac upon which life scrawls the...”
– Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad
November 2011
1 post
“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted here
October 2011
6 posts
“The Ghost Dance religion was one of the saddest religions of all time. It was...”
– Ian Frazier, Great Plains
“We aren’t the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy.”
– Ted Kaczynski, quoted here
“Shaped by imperatives of survival, the human mind will not normally function as...”
– John Gray
“If he had a motto, it may have come from “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which he...”
– from the New York Times obit for Steve Jobs
5 tags
“‘AIYEE!’ cries the man, rushing at the nun, wielding a power tool.”
– DFW, IJ
September 2011
2 posts
They neglect to tell you that after the urge to get high magically vanishes and you’ve been Substanceless for maybe six or eight months, you’ll begin to start to ‘Get In Touch’ with why it was that you used Substances in the first place. You’ll start to feel why it was you got dependent on what was, when you get right down to it, an anesthetic. ‘Getting In...
August 2011
36 posts
“Finding her: What then? Only that what love there was to Stencil had become...”
– Pynchon, V.
“This was all there was to dream; all there ever was: the Street.”
– Pynchon, V.
“Business, sure of its own transcendent powers, got us all to interpret life...”
– Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
“In Baudelaire I had the found the following piece of curious advice: Whenever...”
– Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
“The strangeness of life, the more you resisted it, the harder it bore down on...”
– Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
“It’s possible that a man like Hoberly by falling apart intends to bear...”
– Bellow, Herzog
“When that Messiah, that savior faculty the imagination was roused, finally we...”
– Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
“The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and...”
– DFW, IJ
“Good humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we...”
– Ernest Renan
“There are many chances that the world may be nothing but a fairy pantomime of...”
– Ernest Renan, quoted in The Varieties of Religious Experience
“If there were such thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be...”
– James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
“No one organism can possibly yield to its owner the whole body of truth.”
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
“All comes out even at the end of the day, and all comes out still more even when...”
– Voltaire, in a letter
“Inspiration doesn’t give rise to practice. It emerges during practice: an...”
– Julie
“I wonder, did he think money made the difference between success and failure?...”
– Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
“‘The boy enters the world and learns its filthy cutthroat tricks, the...”
– Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
“It comes to this, that the individual has no way to prove out what’s in...”
– Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
“People of powerful intellect never are quite sure whether or not it’s all...”
– Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
“And truth is only true as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human...”
– Bellow, Herzog
“But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second...”
– Bellow, Herzog
“Identity myths are useful fabrications that stitch back together otherwise...”
– Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding
“During the night I had thought of something Keats had said about Robert Burns....”
– Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
“By means of music man affirmed that the logically unanswerable was, in a...”
– Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift
“Renata was right, I was away! Once in a while, I get shocked into upper...”
– Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift