COMMONPLACE BOOK
“They change their sky, not
Their soul who run across the sea”
-Horace
“The dice of drowned mens’ bones he saw bequeath an embassy”
-Hart Crane
“And silent answers crept across the stars”
-Hart Crane
“This fabulous shadow only the sea knows.”
-At Melville’s Tomb, Hart Crane
“I can’t watch the seat for a long time or what happens on land doesn’t interest me anymore.”
-Monica Vitti
“I have seen what men have only dreamed they saw.”
-Rimbaud
“The mountain nymph, sweet liberty.”
-Milton
“All mathematics leads, doesn’t it, sooner or later, to human suffering.”
-Pynchon
“It was one of those moments that are the opposite of blindness.”
-Anne Carson
“What are these utopian dreams of ours but defective forms of time travel?”
-Pynchon
“He’s an American, a cowboy, his idea of romance begins and ends with me on my back.”
-Pynchon
“There are the lover and the beloved but these two come from different countries and somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new strange loneliness and it is this knowledge that makes him suffer...And it is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that , in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover and with the best possible reason. For the lover is forever trying to strip the beloved. The lover craves any possible relation to the beloved, even if it only causes him pain.”
-Carson McCullers, BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE
“We say our communities exist, nations do not.”
-Huey Newton
“My life was full of routine surprises.”
-DeLillo
“To be a tourist is to escape accountability.”
-DeLillo
“As an adult, I’ve only been two ages, 23 & 40.”
-DeLillo
“I told him I was a traveler only in the sense I covered distances, I traveled between places, never in them.”
-DeLillo
“Photography is alright if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops for a split second.”
-Hockney
“I would annex the planets if I could”
-Cecil Rhodes
“The endless indignities and sadomasochistic games that inevitably follow from top-down organization.”
-David Graeber
“There really is an epidemic of sorrows sweeping our world, the brunt of which is being borne, for now, by only a luckless few.”
-Teju Cole
“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”
-T. S. Elliot
“Your internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there is no innocence, anywhere, never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter death-wish for the planet, and don’t think that’s changed, kid.”
-Pynchon
“The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;”
-Hart Crane
“And silent answers crept across the stars”
-Hart Crane
“The bottom of the sea is cruel”
-Hart Crane
“Should I the Queen of Love refuse
Because she rose from stinking ooze?
-Johnathan Swift
“Cats are prowlers, uncanny creatures of the night. Cruelty and play are one for them. They live by and for fear, practicing being scared or spooking humans with sudden rushings and ambushes. Cats dwell in the occult, that is, the hidden, in the middle ages they were hunted and killed for their association with witches. Unfair? But the cat really is in league with chthonian nature, Christianity’s mortal enemy...Cats are telepathic, or at least they think they are. Many people are unnerved by their cool stare..they are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking the rules. Their “evil” look at such times is no human projection, the cat might be the only animal that savors the perverse or reflects upon it.
Thus the cat is an adept of the chthonian mysteries...It is narcissistically always wanting to be seen, when it is disheveled its spirits fall. Cats have a sense of pictorial composition...Haughty, solitary, precise, they are arbiters of elegance-that principle I find natively Egyptian.
Cats are poseurs. They have a sense of persona-and become visibly embarrassed when reality punctures their dignity. Apes are more human but less beautiful; they posture but never pose...The cat is the least christian inhabitant of the average home...The cat is a law unto itself. It has never lost its despotic air of Oriental luxury and indolence...cats have secret thoughts , a divided consciousness. No other animal is capable of ambivalence.”
-Camille Paglia
“Sadomasochism is a symptom of a cultural thirst for hierarchy.”
-Camille Paglia
“We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will in turn fashion us. Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of bad habit, custom, law or prejudice and it is up to you to create these situations.”
-Crimethink
“Like when you dream of killing a person
Who never stops dying”
-Bolano
“Soñé con detectives helados en el gran
Refrigerador de Los Ángeles
En el gran refrigerador de Mexico DF”
-Bolano
“Determinists forces are wrong
Though irresistibly strong
But of god there’s no dearth
For he visits the earth
But not for sufficiently long”
-PKD
“All that’s colossal is fraud”
-PKD
“Such charity is not a gift. The recipient of a gift, sooner or later, be able to give it away. If it does not really raise him to the level of the group, it is just a decoy, providing him with the daily bread while across town someone is buying the bakery. This “charity” is a way of negotiating the boundary of class...At its worst, it is the “tyranny of the gift” which uses the bonding power of generosity to manipulate people.”
-Lewis Hyde
“The YT folks in Washington, they know how
To give a colored man a nickel, just to see him bow”
-Bourgeois Blues
“Charity: promoting the happiness of our inferiors”
-William Paler
“Poverty here [europe] is decent and honorable. In America, it lays one open to continuous insults on all sides.” -Ezra Pound
“and I will resolve to never be happy enough to
forgive you
and I promise from now on I will only
have emotions that can be perceived as neutral.”
-Mira Gonzalez
“And it’s sad because being forced to face up to your ordinariness, your lack of nobility, is so beautiful.”
-Ta-Nehisi Coates
“A good pimp is always really alone.”
-Iceberg Slim
“A pimp is really a whore who’s reversed the game on whores.”
-Iceberg Slim
“There’s nothing wrong with a utopia unless you have just one.”
-David Graeber
“The Southerner and the Russian are both “types” in that they both have recognizable and national psychological traits. Hedonistic, imaginative, lazy and emotional- there is surely a cousinly resemblance.”
-Carson McCullers
“More bad reasons for her sorrow”
-Keates
“An evening steep’d in honeyed indolence.”
-Keates
“All myth is enriched pattern.”
-Anne Carson
“But you overlook
an important cultural functions of games
To test the will of the gods.
Hulzinga reminds us that war is a form of divination”
-Anne Carson
“I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitive and participle oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.”
-Anne Carson
“My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it”
-Anne Carson
“Nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without ruin.”
-Antigonick
“You can rot here [LA] without feeling it.”
-John Rechy
“Rusha wants to mirror the dreamlike state that many people find typical of California living, to give the feeling that there is no longer any hierarchies-of ideas, emotions or events. He is the essence of California cool.”
-Ed Lucie-Smith
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us think the rest is real.”
-Baudrillard
“It is delusion that makes men bold
Knocks them sideways
Causes grief.”
-Anne Carson
“Sometimes I wonder if Euripedes saw the very texture of reality as ironic.”
-Anne Carson
“TV ain’t got no temperature.”
-Pimp C
“The relationships we have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. One should aim not for liberation but rather for a general economy of pleasure not based on sexual norms.”
-Foucault
“One must take into account the shocking fact that we live in a world that spins. After considering this truth, nothing should come as a surprise.”
-Ligotti
“Dirt is matter that crossed a boundary it ought not have crossed.”
-Anne Carson
“She fancied that she could hear voices, and that the voices might belong to creatures like herself.”
-Dog Soldiers
“And so, not knowing how to believe in god and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I along with people on the fringe, keep a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the loss of unconsciousness, which is the basis of life.”
-Pessoa
“They shall ask thee concerning what thou shalt expand: say, the abundance.”
-Qur’an Sura 2
“The wonder lingers, the shame remains”
-Pale Fire
“Efa maty daholo ny efa lehibe, fa izahay zaza mpandimby fotsiny no sisi” <The adults/leaders are all dead, we, the children, are all that is left>
“To restore silence is the role of objects.”
-Beckett
“There is no fist large enough to hide the sky”
-Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Panther
“White people, lacking in community, must make due with property.”
-Teju Cole
“Time measures nothing but itself.”
-Sebald
“The ceaseless creasing of the morning sea”
-Wolcott
“The perpetual ideal is astonishment.”
-Wolcott
“Every night has a different smell, my friend. It would be unbearable otherwise.”
-Bolano
“Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”
-Gertrude Stein
“To address God is a violent act.”
-Anne Carson
“To fall, after all, is our earliest motion.”
-Anne Carson
“Someday, you’ll need less evidence;
the missing won’t cease to exist.
For now, you stop to eat the free fruit
only you knew would appear
& for that you have your human hands,
infinite nature, a single
body standing on this earth—”
-Brenda Hillman
“I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone, and that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.”
-Obama
“These jobs were swallowed up by the words that describe them. The job title was the job. The job looked back at me from the monitor on the desk where I absorbed my situation in full command of the fact that this is where I belonged.”
-DeLillo
“Apocalypse is inherent to the structure of time.”
-DeLillo
“Everything we do belongs to a world we have not created.”
-Nagel
“Ego, that cyclone of calamities.”
-Parliament of Birds
“They built worlds suitable to the creatures they’d become.”
-Gene Wolfe
“What can be expected of a man who has spent 20 years of his life putting heads on pins?”
-Tocqueville, review of THE WEALTH OF NATIONS
“My plan was never to get married. I was going to be an Art Monster instead. Women almost never become Art Monsters because Art Monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella, Vera licked his stamps.”
-Jenny Offill
“If my mother tongue is shaking the foundation of your state, it probably means you built your state on my land.”
-Apê Musa
“Manan-jandry, dia afak’olan etina; mana-joky dia afak’olon-teny” <if you have a younger sibling, you should have no problem carrying packages, if you have an older sibling, you’ll have no problem speaking>
“Ny marary no andriana” <sick people are kings>
“izaho sy ny vary dia mitovy” <The rice and I are the same>
-Andrianampoinimerina w/r/t draining a swamp to build Tana
“ Ny ranomasina no valapariako” <The sea is the boundary of my rice field>
-Andrianampoinimerina
“Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly “inferior” capacity to feel deeply. Built in this way, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.”
-Audre Lorde
“Anyone who has met an anorexic 14 year old knows that she is terrifyingly violent, even if she is doing absolutely nothing. In fact, it is the doing of nothing that makes her so violent. It is her commitment to nothingness.”
-Audrey Wollen
“Oh beauty? - Yeah, it’s this thing I make with my hands every day.”
-Audrey Wollen
“i like my body when it is with your body...muscles better and nerves more.”
-e.e. Cummings
“Truth, like love and sleep resents
Approaches that are too intense”
-W. H. Auden
“The “essential” totem pole is that which is fixed in the contemporary imagination as what a totem pole should be. The tall, free standing columns decorated with multiple images that convey the legends of the owners. To be deemed authentic this essential pole must have been developed before YT contact, during some presumed golden age of cultural purity. That cultural purity discredits most, if not all, hybridity, and disregards the dynamic nature of cultural interactions.”
-Totem Poles, a cultural history
“Technological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of human subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but with its sensibilities, affect and unconscious fantasms.”
-Guattari
“To see beyond, one must change the way one pays attention.”
-Luhrmann
“There is no invisible but coherent cause behind historical phenomena. Rather, absent causes generate uncanny connections.”
-S.P. Miller
“The signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth - I know I presume - you must look into the technology of these matters. Even in the heart of certain molecules...you must ask two questions. First, what is the nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control.”
-Gravity’s Rainbow
“The overlap between the grave, the bath and the bed; strategic escapes from the burden of verticality.”
-Anne Carson
“An object does not have a color, it makes a color (the way a bell makes a sound)”
-Anne Carson
“North Carolina: a valley of humility between two hills of conceit.”
-Lord Culpepper, gov. of VA
“As regards our neighbors North Carolina is and always was the sink of America, the refuge of our renegades, and till it is in better order, it is a danger to us.”
-Lord Culpepper
“Patricarial societies have generated a strong demand for such love magic on the part of economically vulnerable women.”
-R. Chestnut
“The evil that men do lives on after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”
-Shakespere
“Thousands of people are maintained on comfortable salaries in air-conditioned offices simply in order to ensure that poor people continue to feel bad about themselves.”
-Graeber
“How vain the opinions is of some certain people of the East Indies who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding and that they can speak but will not, for fear that they should be imployed (sic) and set to work.”
-Antonine Le Grand c.1675
“I turn to the most prominent example: the birds. The habit of flocking, smallness, similarities of traits, their ancient connection to the two twilights, the beginning of the day and the end, the fact of being more often heard than seen-all of this moves us to acknowledge the primacy of the species and the almost perfect nullity of individuals.”
-Borges
“Experiencing anxiety does not mean that anyone is doing anything to us that is unjust.”
-Sarah Schulman
“We can see, in other words, that the human body and not the steam engine and not even the clock was the first machine developed by capitalism”
-Silvia Federici
“Who would want to discourage the people of the world from translating, merely because it is fundamentally impossible?”
-Thomas Mann
“This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjectures here or there, try out continua of intensities, segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bring froth continuous intensities for a BwO”
-Deleuze and Guattari
“When the anthropologist arrives, the gods depart”
-Haitian proverb
“Jingfei-yijia” <cops and gangsters belong to the same family>
-Chinese proverb
“Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could turn to our friends and say, I felt anxious and I exaggerated and instead of them using that as a reason to ignore us, disparage us, or punish us, whenever we say, I feel anxious and so I exaggerated, our friends would put their arms around us, hug us and kiss us and thank us for telling the truth.”
-Sarah Schulman
“We mourn not man, but a man; and we lament nof for his lot, but for our own. His death is as the closing of a door upon the singular, particular self which, projected through his flesh, nourished the world of substance, which we shared. We mourn this man because to us his spirit was not like any other. The moment of death is as a separation of the mold from the form to which it had transferred, all the particularity of its configuration.”
-Divine Horseman, [my father’s citation]
“This world of dew…
Though a world of dew it remains
Still, even so…”
-Issa [haiku]
“This world of ours:
Viewing blossoms on the surface
Above hell”
-Issa [haiku]
“Winter drizzle:
Mice skittering across
Zither strings”
-Buson [haiku]
“Just my luck,
Paradise turned out to be
A real yawner”
-Ochō [haiku]
“The bureaucrat's tot
Learns about grabby-grabby
An awful lot”
-unknown haiku
“Outta one hole
But thanks to another hole
Into one more hole”
-unknown haiku, 1804
“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space”
-Van der Rohe
“Cultural solutions are organisms, not machines and cannot be invented deliberately or imposed by prescription. Perhaps all one can do is to clarify as well as possible the needs and pressures that bear upon the process of cultural evolution.”
-Wendall Berry
“Nobody but a southerner knows the wrenching, rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and The Wildernesses and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk about in broad daylight and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he step off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, then he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder.”
-Walker Percy
“Il est interdit d’interdire” <it is forbidden to forbid>
“We believe that when the state finally fades, nations will be named after people and people will be nations.”
-Abbie Hoffman
“To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least a single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money or a little money or less money or more money but money, always money, and if you have money or you don’t have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?”
-Henry Miller
“Space is heaven; time hell”
-Carl Smidt
“Even the southern physical world was a kind of cosmic conspiracy against reality and in favor of romance.”
-W.J. Cash
“Men are free when they’re living in a homeland, not when they are straining and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized, purpose. Not when they are escaping, to some wild west. The most unfree souls go West, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of their freedom. The should is a rattling of chains, always was. Men are not free when they are doing just as they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care to do.”
-D.H. Lawrence
“Ideally the museums should be looted every 50 years or so and their collections returned to circulation.”
-Bruce Chatwin
“Time is a road in 5 directions”
-Mesoamerican concept
“Porque la vida es sueño y los sueños sueños son”
-Calderon de la Barca
“I’d have to be like a mirror, reflecting her secret needs and dreams. She’d have to see me as the means to these gratifications.”
-Iceberg Slim
“I realized she was like me in every other street poisioned nigger spawned behind the invisible walls of the ghetto stokades. She was a trapped, vulnerable but hurting human beneath the tough facade of leopard rage and bravado. But in the cruel nature of our special entrapment, and my survival, my comrade in pain was ironically my prey. I would have to scrape to the raw nerve ends of her emotions, put her on the rack to steal her.”
-Iceberg Slim
“Girl, why are you so fucking square in this rich, fast, cold world where every motherfucker in it that’s copping a big, easy fast buck and silky living ain’t?”
-Iceberg Slim
“Men are frightened by their bones”
-Popol Vuh
“Every era puts invisible shackles on those who live through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”
-Liu Cixin
“The humility of the subjects creates the dignity of the throne.”
-The Emperor
“Those who were sent to the colonies did not take on a proletarian status. They were used as cadres, administrative functionaries, as tools for surveillance and control of the colonized people. And it was certainly in order to avoid the forming of an alliance between these “lesser whites” and the colonized people- an alliance which would have been just as dangerous out there as proletarian unity would have been in Europe - that a ridgid, racist ideology was foisted on them: “watch out, you’ll be living amongst cannibals.””
-Foucault
“Only when ideas of honor change is it possible to envision a change in ideology.”
-Toby Green
“Nazism is the application of colonialism to Europe”
-Aime Cesaire
“Technologies of self: techniques that permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and in a manner to transform themselves, modify themselves and to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power.”
-Foucault
“In America, one likely candidate for the protagonist of a reborn trickster myth is the Confidence Man, especially as he appears in literature and film. Some have even argued that the Confidence Man is a covert American hero. We enjoy it when he comes to town, even if a few people get their bank accounts drained, because he embodies things that are actually true about America but can’t be openly declared. As examples, the degree to which capitalism lets us steal from our neighbors, or the degree to which institutions like the stock market require the same kind of confidence that criminal con men need… the Confidence Man is one of America’s unacknowledged founding fathers...If by American we mean a land of rootless wanderers and the free markets, the land not of natives but immigrants, the shameless land where anyone can say anything at anytime, the land of opportunity and thus opportunists, the land where individuals are allowed and even encouraged to act without regard to community, then trickster has not disappeared. “America” is his apotheosis, he’s pandemic.”
-Lewis Hyde
“Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.”
-Simone Weil
“Culture is something done to us, art is something we do to culture.”
-Carl Andre
“A happening should be like a net to catch a fish, the nature of which we do not know.”
-John Cage
“Incorporeal domains of entities we detect at the same time we produce them, and which appear to have always been there.”
-Guattari
“Oportet operatorem interesse operi” <the operator must put themselves into the operation>
“Resonance is, of course, the complete opposite of reflection. While reason implies the disjunction of subject and object, resonance inoves their conjunction. Where reason requires separation and autonomy, resonance entails adjacency sympathy and the collapse of the boundary between perceiver and perceived.”
-Veit Erlman
“The wounded cry as the clown / doubles his meaning”
-W. H. Auden
“The psychotic drowns where the mystic swims.”
-Joseph Campbell
“A vast visage of perfect evil. It was metal and cruel and, worst of all, it was god.”
-PKD
“To see beyond, one must change the way one pays attention.”
-Luhrmann
“There’s no invisible but coherent cause behind historical phenomena. Rather, absent causes generate uncanny connections.”
-Stephen Paul Miller
“The signs are real. They are also a symptom of a process. The process follows the same form, same structure. To apprehend it, you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversion tactic. Useful to you, gentleman, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth - I know I presume- you must look into the technology of these matters. Even in the hearts of certain molecules...you must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?”
-Gravity’s Rainbow
“Technological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of human subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but within its sensibility, affects and unconscious fantasm.”
-Guattari
“Caring labor is best conceived as labor that is directed, ultimately, at maintaining or enhancing another’s freedom.”
-David Graeber
“If I took over as master, wouldn’t it be for a mere name? And such a name is only the guest of reality, wouldn’t I be a mere guest...Go home and rule through idleness.”
-Zhungzi
“If you have no use, you have no grief.”
-Zhungzi
“To insist on lecturing a tyrant about humanity and duty and codes of conduct - that looks like using his sinister ways to show how wonderful you are. This is called injuring others.”
-Zhungzi
Comes Meus Fuit in Illo Miserrimo Tempore” <it was my companion in miserable times> -Walter Raleigh's’ tobacco pouch
Ichi-go ichi-e <for this time only, just once>
“”Last forever!” who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
-Annie Dillard
“My gift to you will be an Abyss, she said,
but it will be so subtle you’ll perceive it
only after many years have past
and you are far from Mexico and me.
You’ll find it when you need it most,
and that won’t be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe you’ll remember me,
if only for a little.”
-Bolano
“Our situation may not only be stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we can suppose.”
-McKenna
“May you live long enough to know why you were born.”
-Cherokee birth blessing
“A man is another person - a woman is yourself.”
-Djuana Barnes
“We all carry about with us that house of death-the skeleton.”
-Djuana Barnes
“That things just go on is the catastrophe.”
-Walter Benjamin
“We are not
Pleased the way we thought
We would be pleased”
-Kay Ryan
“Today, everything exists to end up in a photo. A way of certifying experience, taking photos is also a way of refusing it- by limiting the experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”
-Sontag
“The mother of useful arts is necessity; that of fine arts, superfluidity and abundance.”
-Schopenhauer
Panta rhei <everything flows>
-Hereclitus
“Other purples also
Leave us vacant
Portals, susceptible
To vagrant spirits
…
…an
Impersonal and
Intermittent immortality
Of purple”
-Kay Ryan
“You aren’t swept up whole,
however it feels. You’re
atomized. The Wind passes.
You congeal. It’s
a surprise.”
-Kay Ryan
“Perhaps you
Specialized
More than
You imagined”
-Kay Ryan
“Everything contains some
Silence”
-Kay Ryan
“Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children
Like the eucalyptus
they make the soil
beneath them barren
To stand in a
grove of them
is hideous”
-Kay Ryan
“In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds”
-Wallace Stevens
“Confusion & clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information.”
-Tufle
“All things are always on the move simultaneously.”
-Churchill
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
-Marx
“The characteristic feature of modernity is criticism.”
-Octavio Paz
“What could be more productive than a life of isolation, where the only relations we have with each other are relationships of reciprocal discipline. Daddy controlling mommy, mommy teaching the children that life is hard and survival problematic, neighbors getting together to keep the neighborhood “clean,” sociallity shrinking to those occasions that help us find and keep a job?”
-Caffntz & Frederici
“The wasteland grows, woe to him who hides wastelands within.”
-Nietzche
“What characterizes the modern West is its success in masking its fascination with death with a fascination with the future, thus freeing its creative energy.”
-Fatima Mernissi
“All monotheistic religions are shot through with conflicts between the divine and the feminine.”
-Mernissi
“Nothing is closer to a cry than music”
-Tchicaya U Tam’si
“Nothing is pure which resists the mixing of things; I mean that real purity abhors all purity”
-Tchicaya U Tam’si
“Environmentalism without class struggle is gardening.”
-Chico Mendes
“My religion is my politics, my politics is my religion.”
-William Blake, Gandhi
“Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit” <called or uncalled, god will be present>
-Inscribed over Jung’s door
“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”
-Osama Bin Laden
“The YT man is a spoiled child, when he gets the blues he gets neurotic.”
-Mezz Mezzerow
“Never remind a gangster of his pulse unless you want to lose yours.”
-Mezz
“Life appears only as means to life”
-Marx
“It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
-F. Douglass
“Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country, give money to the rich people of a poor country.”
-Parenti
“Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own egos and cannot live well with others in the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth.”
-Joost A. M. Meerloo
“Not one of them is demented with the mania for owning things, not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived 1,000 years ago, not one is respectable or unhappy over this whole earth.”
-Whitman w/r/t animals
“Cold war-era conception of “democracy” which reduced it to a morally glamourous label for the way rulers are elected, rather than the kinds of power they hold, or the ways they exercise it.”
-Pankaj Mishra
“He is a disturbing symptom of the malaise to which he promises a cure.”
-Mishra
“I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled everyday, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday- that they’ll come out, and forget death, and lose their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level - and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive.”
-Gravity’s Rainbow
“I am so tired of waiting
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two-
And see what the worms are eating
At the rind.”
-Langston Hughes
“When the stranger says: “What’s the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?” What will you answer? “We all dwell together to make money from one another”? or, “ This is a community”? Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.”
-T. S. Eliot
“Where wolves are killed off, foxes increase.”
-Melville
“We are all slaves in the eyes of the man”
-Slogan, above confederate flag on Young Patriots logo
“When there are no trees left, birds will land on men’s heads.”
-Fante saying to look for unusual reasons when something odd is happening
“It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine”
-Huxley
“The strikingly frequent repetition, especially in the English Puritan literature, of warning against any trust in aid and friendship of man.”
-Weber
“While the medieval peasant created festivals as an escape from work, the Puritan embraced work as an escape from terror.”
-E. Hregreich
“Race is a theory of history”
-Tavia Nyong’o
“Yet theory is, at its best, nothing more than dreams/myths/histories aimed at giving expression to new ways of seeing and being in the world.”
-C. Riely Snortor
“He who hates vice, hates humanity”
-Melville
“Now I am not unaware that there are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take strange delight in showing what they think have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.”
-Melville
“It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.”
-Tacitus
“Humor: a method of exploring the implicit themes in thought or in a relationship…that is to say, the explosive moment in humor is the moment when the labeling of the mode undergoes a dissolution and resynthesis.”
-G. Bateson
“We make the path by walking”
-Chuang Tzu
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
-Goodhart’s law
“A measure colonizes behavior.”
-Goodhart
“Before you understand life, how can you understand death?”
-Confucius
“Menos burros, mas elotes”
“There is a reason, after all, that some people want to colonize the moon, and others to dance before it as before an ancient friend.”
-Baldwin
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior “righteous indignation” - this is the height of psychological luxury - the most delicious of moral treats.”
-Huxley
“For mankind is ever the same and nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is altered.”
-J. Dryden
“Never tell a cop the truth.”
-Russian proverb
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
-Tolstoy
“Every day is a god”
-Annie Dillard
“But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot, there never has been a generation of whole men and women who lived well, even one day…But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.”
-Annie Dillard
“Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets everyday and to thrust his benevolence out to the most remote circumference, to people he doesn’t know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.”
-C.S. Lewis
“You can’t get Awo <spiritual knowledge> from a book.”
-Yoruba proverb
“We must plow over language in its entirety.”
-Wittgenstien
“Aspice ut aspiciar” <look at me so that I may be looked upon>
-above door over Atrium of Time, BotNS
“It is not the slumber of reason that produces monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”
-Deleuze
“Hence our motto must be: reform of consciousness, not through dogmas, but by analyzing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or political form.”
-Marx
“The energy of pain must be kept moving.”
-Laura Lapsky
“Fucked up situations fuck us up.”
-W. Gass
“Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it; be cool, but care.”
-Pynchon
“The society which rests on modern industry is not accidently or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally speculist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing but itself.”
-DeBord
“Half of the time you think you’re thinking, you’re really listening.”
-McKenna
“”Mountain Lords” we called the apes, when we got them drunk.”
-Li Po
“There is another world, other than this one we choose to live in.”
-Li Po
“You’ll never live to be a thousand
Much anguish leads to an early death
Drink deep, and dwell within the cup
Conceal yourself, your only true treasure.”
-Li Po
“Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to stay the same; leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.”
-Foucault
“Though you remain
Convinced
To be alive
You must have somewhere
To go
Your destination remains
Elusive”
-Keorapeste Kgositsile
“The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you have gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words so I can talk to them?”
-Zhuangzi
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world in their own hue, and each one shows only what lies in focus.”
-Emerson
“All investigations of time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.”
-Pynchon
“Who claims Truth, Truth abandons.”
-Pynchon
“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”
-Pericles
“When an Inuk leaves a round home and enters a square house, he gets a headache and gets nervous.”
-Armand Tagoona
“I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whoes margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.”
-Tennyson
“The United States is also a one-party state, but, in typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”
-Nyerere
“Duos habet et bene pendentes” <he has two and they dangle nicely> said by a cardinal to confirm that the new pope has testicles. To prevent a “Pope Joan” situation, mythical female Pope who gave birth while pope
“All the labor-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being.”
-John Stuart Mill
“Societies live by borrowing from one another, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.”
-Mauss
“Caring labor is in a way the very opposite of mechanical labor; it is about recognizing and understanding the unique qualities, needs and peculiarities of the cared for…in order to provide what they require to flourish. Caring labor is distinguished by its particularity.”
-Graber/Wingrow
“We have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as rather stupid.”
-LeGuin
“No longer a slave to ambition
I laugh at the world and its shams
As i think of my pleasant condition
Surrounded by acres of clams”
-Francis Henry
“To learn which questions are unanswerable and not to answer them; this is the most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
-LeGuin
“Those whose enduring object is power in the world are only too happy to use, without remorse, the others, whose aim is, of course, to transcend questions of power. Each regards the others as a pack of fools.”
-Against the Day
“Conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping of the postmodern age.”
-Jameson
“Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles.”
-MacBeth
“Truth is most deceptive”
-Anglo-Saxon proverb
“Only connect”
-E.M. Foster
“This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.”
-DeLillo
“Caput Gerat Lupinum” <Let him wear the wolf’s head> to make someone an outlaw, it’s okay to kill them
“There is no such thing as an innocent metaphor”
-Thomas Moynihan
“Every object is an hourglass.”
-Thomas Moynihan
“Ubi Sunt qui ante nos fuerunt” <where are those who were before us?>
“Omni mutantur - nihil interit” <all things change, nothing perishes>
-Ovid
“Dialectics, matrices, archetypes, all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across the table, to cheating and lost hope, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West’s ancient curse.”
-Gravity’s Rainbow
“The most beautiful kosmos is sweepings piled up at random”
-Heraclitus
“All foreigners and beggars come from Zeus”
-Homer
“Arms themselves can prompt men to use them”
-Homer
“And when they finished their lovemaking, they shared another pleasure - telling stories”
-Homer
“If we are to survive, we must take nothing that is dead and choose wisely among the dying”
-Black Marxism
“Capitalism will always be racist and sexist because it has to mystify its core contradiction- the promise of prosperity versus the reality of widespread poverty- by denigrating the “nature” of those it exploits: colonial subjects, women and the dispossessed.”
-Silva Frederici
“The more closely we associated the diet with cavemen the more we loved it. Cavemen wer not famous for living a long time, but they were famous for being exactly what the fuck they were supposed to be, something we could no longer say about ourselves.”
-Patricia Lockwood
“Both intrinsically structured and free-associative, not unlike a nightmare.”
-Infinite Jest
“Travel is the saddest of life’s pleasures.”
-Theroux
“What did weekends mean to the leasuried poor?”
-Little, Big
“She will never be happy and honest at the same time.”
-Everything is Illuminated
“Act so there is no use in a center.”
-Gertrude Stein
“Our dependance on plants breeds a contempt for them…In this somewhat topsy-turvy view plants remind us of our weakness.”
-Pollan
“Andriamanitra tsy mizaha taran’olona” <God is not resperter of persons>
“They were merely loud in a dull way.”
-House of Mirth
“They crossed impossible deserts. They were assaulted by thieves and left for dead. They went mad. They murdered. They starved. Allies in a hard and lonely mission, they quarrelled and accused each other of being homosexual, living sepretly in their own tents and communicating by letter. They ran out of water and drank their own blood to stay alive.”
-The Strong Brown God
“Too much travel…too much strangeness and novelty could loosen the moorings of the soul.”
-Rushdie
Puro reloj <nothing but the clock> - Spanish expression w/r/t American life
“Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.”
-W. S. Merwin
“For certain more curious and disenchanted spirits, the pleasure of ugliness comes from an even more mysterious sentiment, which is a thirst for the unknown and a taste for the horrible. It is this sentiment, the germ of which all of us carry to a greater or lesser extent, that drives certain poets into clinics and anatomy theaters, and women to public executions. I’m sorry that no one understands this - a harp without a low-string. There are people who blush about having loved a woman when they realize that she is a fool…Stupidity is often the ornamentation of beauty. It is that which gives eyes the lackluster limpidity of blackish ponds, and the oily clam of tropic seas.”
-Baudelaire
“I loved my friend
He went away from me
There is nothing more to say
The poem ends
Soft as it began-
I love my friend”
-Langston Hughes
“There is in the world only one choice, between loneliness and vulgarity.”
-Schopenhauer
“Joy is the nature of things. Look closely-where is this fleeting consequence you’ve tangled your life in.”
-Du Fu
“It is here in idleness that I become real.”
-Du Fu
“Here a tradition of seated men keeps women on their feet.”
-Du Fu
“I know the earth absorbs perfume and urine with the same indifference.”
-Zora Neale Hurston
“Beauty is always bizarre.”
-Baudelaire
“Stranger, here you will do well to stay; here our highest good is pleasure.”
-Inscription on garden of Epicurean school
“Knowledge is not for knowing, it is for cutting”
-Foucault
“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.”
-Baldwin
“Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.”
-Pascal
“What is this strange madness, this mania for sleeping each night in a different bed.”
-Petrach
“To live in one land, is captivity
To run all countries, a wild rougery.”
-Dunne
“This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by a desire to change beds…I think I'd be happy in a place I happened not to be, and this question of moving is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.”
-Baudelaire
Solvitur Ambulando <It is solved by walking>
Mundus Senescit <the world grows old>
“I have sometimes thought it possible to advance a theory of settlement - and therefore civilization- as “the lean season capitalized.”
-Chatwin
“Political questions become unsolvable when disguised as cultural ones.”
-Gramsci
“All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being.”
-Vonnegut
“Most desire is non-consensual; most desires aren’t desired.”
-Andrea Long Chu
“We are imprisoned in ourselves, but it is a very big prison.”
-Wendy Doinger
“None of them feels that work, per se, is good; it is only the means to idleness. The theory of the YT man, no matter what his practice, is the reverse; he feels work is good, and idleness, being agreeable, must be evil.”
-William Percy
“We men and women are all in the same boat on a stormy sea. We owe each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.”
-G. K. Chesterton
“Weapons of defense: Silence, Exile, Cunning”
-Joyce
“The dream is the aquarium of the night.”
-V. Hugo
”Cock is okay but only schoolboys have dicks. Thus civilization advances by humps and licks.”
-Willaim Gass
“Certainly nothing else will do for fellatio, which has never had its poet.”
-William Gass
“Fucked up situations fuck us up.”
-Williams Gass
“How do we short-circuit control?”
- W. Burroughs
“You know, the only good trip, is a bad trip”
- Genesis P-Orridge
“Everyone in heaven is 33”
-Al-Ghazali
“And no dream is entirely a dream.”
-A. Schnitzler
“Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on.”
-Saidiya Hartman
“Naming can also be a covering over.”
-Kathryn Yusoff
“What we call history is perhaps a way of avoiding responsibility for what happened, and is happening, in time.”
-Baldwin
“Whiteness: ownership of the Earth, forever and ever.”
-W.E.B. DeBois
“Slavery and genocide are the ur-text to discussions of species and geology. Their empirical bedrock and epistemic anchor.”
-Yusoff
“The person who records cannot intervene; the person who intervenes cannot record.”
-Sontag
“Neither from itself nor from another
Nor from both
Nor without a cause
Does anything, anywhere arise.”
-Nagarjuna
“Stasis does not endure”
-Nagarjuna
“What language expresses is non-existent.”
-Nagarjuna
“Whoever is uprooted, uproots.”
-Tiqqun
“How much better is the silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
-Woolf
“The soul is a form of the body.”
-Klossowski
Communal Ritual Ingredients
Synchronized singing/dancing
Collaborative music making
Extreme physical exhaustion
Feeling of common fate
Shared experience of danger/terror
Supernatural/mystical beliefs
Casual opacity/lack of instrumentality
“So long as we stay in place, Satan is more than satisfied. He loves circular, obsessive activity. Entropy is his meat. When the world becomes a pendulum, he will inhabit his throne.”
-Mailer
“In this awakening, there has been a good deal of pain. When I lived in other places, I looked at their evils with the curiosity of a traveler; I was not responsible for them, it cost me nothing to be a critic, for I had not been there long and I did not feel like I would stay. But here, now that I am both a native and a citizen, there is no immunity to what is wrong. It is impossible to escape the sense that I am involved with history.”
-Wendell Berry
“The whole world is just food and the eater of food.”
-Upanishads
“Man is not a rational animal, he’s a rationalizing animal.”
-Heinlein
“The statement of a terrible truth has a kind of healing power.”
-Wendell Berry
“Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus.”
-Nietzche
“All of you who are in love with hectic work and what is fast, new, strange - you find it hard to bear yourself, your diligence is escape and the will to forget yourself.”
-Nietzche
“The principles of the con are basically the same on every level.”
-Iceberg Slim
“To spot the similar in the dissimilar is the mark of poetic genius.”
-Aristotle
“Though the earth is solid, the chameleon is cautious with its steps.”
-Ewe saying
“Divinity is an energy not an act, do not say, “I believe,” say, “I serve”
-Maya Deren
“Myth is the smoke of history.”
-John Keay
“This collection was not an accumulation of excerpts intended to facilitate the writing of a study but constitutes the main work, with the writing secondary. The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they may illustrate one another and were able to prove their raison d’etre in a free-floating state, as it were.”
-Walter Benjamin
“A great Truth is a Truth whose opposite is also true.”
-Mann
“Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one another in life-long activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all actors the world over are the same.”
-MIlan Kundera
“To speak is to lie.”
-W. Burroughs
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
-Wittgenstien
“Man needs play and danger. Civilization gives them work and safety.”
-W. Burroughs
“Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before…he is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer seeking to get off of the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it.”
-Pynchon
“Exuberance is beauty.”
-Blake
“Mindforg’d manacles”
-Blake
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”
-Therou
Male Archetypes
-King
-Warrior
-Magican
-Lover
Female Archetypes
-Amazon
-Mother
-Medical Woman
-Hetaira
-Jung
“To be a one at all you must be a many and that’s not a metaphor.”
-Donna Haraway
“Shame is a flushed, abject feeling while humiliation is the entire apparatus that causes shame to erupt, the entire theater in which the shame appears.”
-Kaustenbaum
“Dread is only memory in the future tense.”
-Elisabeth Ayrton
“The left has no map, but it has a compass.”
-Fernado Coronil
“Paradoxes explain everything, since they cannot be explained. That was a paradox, of course, or rather it was a great truth, embodied in a paradox. The truth being that a thing cannot be employed to prove itself.”
-Wolfe, On Blue’s Waters
“But what is the gnostic situation? A basic definition: you are in a trap and you need to escape.”
-Erik Davis
“The point is to get drunk on a glass of water.”
-Henry Miller
“In our unenlightened state, we are food for the moon.”
-Gurdjieff
“If you get the message, hang up the phone.”
-Alan Watts
“The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number.”
-Angle to Descartes in a dream
“Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest
And passage through these looms
God ordained motion, but ordained no rest.”
-Henry Vaughn
“For the Gods have ordained that everything should be hard for the abstemious.”
-Horace
“With a piercing scream, racpacious fortune snatches the crown from one head and likes to place it on another.
-Horace
“What’s the point of wearying your brain (which isn’t up to it) with plans that stretch to infinity.”
-Horace
“Why do we, valiant fellows that we are, aim at so many targets in our short lives? Why give up our country for one that is warmed by another sun? What expatriate has ever succeeded in escaping from himself as well.”
-Horace
“Declaring forbidden what is not forbidden is forbidden.”
-Alam ad-Din ibn Shukr
“Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: the Mark inside.”
-Burroughs
“Capital is, at every level, an eerie entity: conjured of nothing, Capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.”
-M. Fisher
“Izaho Maditra Amin’ny Rariny” <I am stubborn in justice>
-Rakotomaditra (originally, Rakstonanhary)
“Every word was once a poem.”
-Emerson
“You have to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people far removed from any political game. The reason is quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the State to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and bombings which remain unpunished, because the State cannont convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”
-Vincenzo Vinciguerra, Italian neo-fascist bomber
“The ass stops being the behind, and moves upfront to become the booty.”
-Kodwo Eshun
“Human beings are the sex-organs of the machine world.”
-McLuhan
“Metafoolishness is the sudden awareness of the frame you’re in, the blinding realization of the games you’re in, games set up to play you for a fool.”
-Kodwo Eshun
“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
-Weil
“The individual is a bourgeois fetish.”
-Bogdanov
“The cosmos is change, life is discourse.”
-Democritus
“To fools, every serious thing is a joke. To the wise, all jokes are serious.”
-Mawlānā
“I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary…I didn’t come from here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way. Whomever brought me here will have to take me home.”
-Rumi
“The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything... That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.”
-Weil
“Writing prejudicial off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic.”
-Burroughs
“Perception and understanding have come to a stop. And the spirit moves where it wants, etc.”
-Chung Tzu
“I hope to ruin the appetites of every son of a bitch that ever eats in that room…Make those rich bastards feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.”
-Rothko, w/r/t painting a mural for the Four Seasons restaurant in NYC
“Nature Lover, or Something
I am
Not particular.
I like whatever
The sky happens
To be doing at the time.”
-Braughtigan
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
-Wittgenstien
“Sad passions like empathy are used for exploitation.”
-Spinoza
“Not speaking of the way,
Not thinking of what’s to come after
Not questioning name or fame
Here, loving love
You and I look at each other.”
-Yosano Akiko
“Better get drunk and cry,
Than show off your learning,
In public.”
-Ōtamo No Tabito
“I loathe the twin seas
Of being and not being
And long for the mountain
Of Bliss untouched by
The changing tides”
-Anonymous
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
-Wilhoit’s law
“The war on drugs is a long-term fix to capitalism’s woes, combining terror with policy making in a seasoned neolibral mix. Cracking open social worlds and territories once thought unavailable in global capitalism. This project is about re-thinking what is called the war on drugs: It isn’t about prohibition or drug policy. Instead, it looks at how, in this war, terror is used against populations in cites and rural areas, and, how paralle to this terror and resulting panic, polices, that facilatate foreign direct investments, and economic growth, are implemented. This is drug war capitalism.”
-Dawn Paley
“It would not be sad like whales
with their immense and patient sieving
and the sobering modesty
of their general way of living.”
-Kay Ryan
Each soul knows infinity, everything, but confusedly. When I walk beside the sea and hear it, I hear, though without distinguishing them, each wave of which the total sound is made up, and so our confused perceptions come from the impressions which the whole universe makes on us.”
-Leibniz
“It does not make much difference how you divide the sciences, for they are one continuous body, like the ocean.”
-Leibniz
“It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from the effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting any immediate reward, to love without instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.”
― Thomas Merton