Great quotes, memorable bits of wisdom (Thread #2)

"An age is coming when machines will be able to do everything. But how will we know a machine is conscious - how do we know another human being is conscious? There is only one way. When it starts to play. In playfulness lies the highest expression of the human spirit. Doing pointless, purposeless things, just for fun. Being silly for the sake of being silly. Taking pleasure in activities that have nothing to do with survival. Caprice. Frolic. Joke. Jest. Dance. These are the highest signs of intelligence. It is when a creature, having met and surmounted all the practical needs that face him, decides to dance that we know we are in the presence of a human."

Matthew Parris, in THE NEW REPUBLIC

(A new Turing Test?)

Nice thought /comment ... But I wonder if people are not forgetting how to be playsome , jesting etc.. When last didnyou hear of a brilliabt practical joke and April Fools ones don't really count. We all take life so seriously and forget to have fun , particularly as we age. So maybe we are becoming more machine like ?

Regarding a long marriage that has grown stale, loveless:

"Time has made torments of our small differences and tolerance of our passions."

-from "We Are Night Time Travelers" (story) by Ethan Canin

#2, April fools Day Jokes DO count.

I have read the New Scientist That Science Popularization Magazine for many a year.

They are known for their April fool day Pranks. Which I usually looked out for.

One year, there was an aside on the front cover, that suggested that the speed of light might have been exceeded. Just a hint mind you. It was so well done that, for a moment, I thought what?

> 2; My father once shared a drawing office with a practical joker. Once, when the Chief Draughtsman had been working on a large and complex drawing for some time, this chap poured some drawing ink out onto a sheet of plate glass, let it dry and then carefully removed it with a razor blade and laid it on the big drawing whilst the chief was out...

Said chief draughtsman also used to wear a bowler hat, and was in the habit of putting it on at home time and tapping it on the crown to make sure that it was firmly seated. This joker started putting strips of paper behind the internal hat band, and over a period of time got quite a lot into it. Every night, the chief put his hat on, and tapped it down, not noticing that every day it was getting just ever so slightly tighter. Then one day the joker removed the paper. Sure enough, at home time, the chief put his hat on, tapped it down - and it fell down over his eyes..

The late Bob Shaw used to tell the story of a practical joke he and some colleagues played on a fellow worker when he worked for a while in a drawing office in Calgary during the 1950s. (What was it about drawing offices?) They had a colleague who was obsessive over how much petrol his car used, and who took great pains to not only work the consumption out but also tell everyone about it. So they clubbed together and bought a gallon of petrol, and sneaked it into his car when no-one was looking. They did this a few times over a period of weeks, and then sat back and waited for it to dawn on this bloke that his car was using no petrol whatsoever...

He always said this was the perfect practical joke, because it was very funny and yet didn't hurt anyone, not even the target.

I just remembered a short SF story, which might be germane to this thread, or at least to the OP.

Humans are captured by aliens who doen't recognize their intelligence. Placed in a Zoo.
Released & recognized when they adopt another creature as a PET. Sorry no idea of the Author or title or even era. Thought it does feel like a '50s. story.

5: If anyone wants to play that joke with the petrol on me, please contact me off-list, and I will tell you where my car is parked.

>5 RobertDay:
I think there is something about drawing rooms - too many materials with which to pull pranks, perhaps.

In the drafting (draughting?) room when I was a junior engineer, there was a dart board on the wall at one end. One day, after throwing a few darts at the board, an engineer removed the point from a dart and, just when one of the drafters (this was the 80s - women and men did the drafting) looked his way, the engineer threw the pointless dart right at his head. The drafter fell right off of his stool trying to avoid the dart.

The same drafter hated the smell of bananas. So, of course, someone taped a banana to the underside of the bottom drawer (near the floor), and just wandered by often enough to see the drafter searching through drawers, papers, and trash cans trying to find out where the stray banana was.

Os.

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."

-Emma Goldman

I must have an AI computer then: it's played many practical jokes on me. It's favourite joke is to crash at the most inopportune moments. Or to suddenly refuse to recognize any printer 10 minutes before class starts and I have to print out worksheets for the students.

A cheat perhaps, because the author of Cloud Atlas is quoting Seneca to Nero; but I hadn't tripped across this before and I love the defiance:

"No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor."

"I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet--a thing that is not love or hate or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things."

-Bertrand Russell, MY PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENT

This is from MASSACRE AT MONTSEGUR (Zoe Oldenbourg), a brilliantly described account of the suppression of the Cathar heresy:

"Though the death of a knight would be noted, the bulk of anonymous corpses are only referred to here and there, in terms of gouting brains or ripped-out lungs dragging in the mud. Even in their moments of agony the common people have no history."

“This was the murder of a great and ancient professional experience passed from one generation to another in thousands of families of craftsmen and members of the intelligentsia. This was the murder of everyday traditions that grandfathers passed to their grandchildren, this was the murder of memories, of a mournful song, folk poetry, of life, happy and bitter, this was the destruction of hearths and cemeteries, this was the death of a nation which had been living side by side with Ukrainians for hundreds of years.”

-Vasily Grossman, writing of the “great void”, the massacre of Jews in Ukraine, WWII

Two zippy quotes from Raymond Chandler's THE HIGH WINDOW:

"From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away."

and

"I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again."

Take a bow, Ray...

" ʻA strange thing is that women rule, both in this world and the next.ʻ "

said by the title character in Jack Kerouacʻs Dr. Sax
(ca. 1956)
(quoted from memory, so I may not have the exact wording.)

How's this for an example of Charles Baudelaire's infamous "spleen":

"The man of intelligence, who will never agree with anyone, should cultivate a pleasure in the conversation of imbeciles and the study of worthless books. From these he will derive a sardonic amusement which will largely repay him for his pains."

-from INTIMATE JOURNALS

From Glenn Greenwald's NO PLACE TO HIDE: EDWARD SNOWDEN, THE NSA AND THE U.S. SURVEILLANCE STATE:

"Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else."

Yes.

"Combat isn't where you might die--though that does happen--it's where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don't underestimate the power of that revelation. Don't underestimate the things young men will do in order to play that game one more time."

-Sebastian Junger, WAR

Wow, that's sad.

But true.

From the BBC this morning:

A recent conference in Islamabad organised by the UN's World Food Program pointed out that 44% of Pakistan's population is facing malnutrition, 15% of whom suffer from acute malnutrition. As a result, some 11 million children under five will suffer from stunted growth.

Good God...

"I have found that the writer cannot even exist in our decomposing modern societies without accommodating himself to interests that forcibly limit his horizons and mutilate his sincerity."

-Victor Serge, MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONARY

(An observation still valid 75 years later.)

"The ruins, spreading over so many acres, seemed to speak of a final catastrophe. But the civilization wasn't dead. It was the civilization I existed in and in fact was still working towards...You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had been already lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life. You were in a place where the future had come and gone." V.S.Naipul A Bend in the River

"To distinguish between right and wrong is not the work of an ordinary mind, and the curious thing is that the more ignorant a person is, the more ready he is to do so." ~ Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan

"Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect; it is shameful to give it up too soon, or to the first comer."
-- George Santayana

A father and son moment according to Beckett:

"I'm tired, he said. You go and lie down, I said, I'll bring you something nice and light in bed, you'll have a little sleep and then we'll leave together. I drew him to me. What do you say to that? I said. He said to it, Yes papa. Did he love me then as much as I loved him? You could never be sure with that little hypocrite."

“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.”

― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"We (as founders of Israel)... have proved that the battle is not hopeless. . . . . .
I say ʻThe battleʻ - - yet as soon as I say it, I sense, staring down at me through the thin curtain of ideology
the savage peaks of a suffering far more primeval.
The very suffering that drives all of us to look constantly for battlefields, forʻchallenges, to fight, to defeat, to win. How shall we tame the ancient instinct to seize . . . a spear or a sword and run after (e.g.) an antelope, and stalk it, hunt it, kill it, and then celebrate the killing? What can we do against the weariness of heart, the subtle, cunning cruelty which is not openly sadistic and can even masquerade as the most reasonable and ʻconstructiveʻ
of behaviors?
What shall we say in the face of the secret brutishness, lurking within each of us, what our forefathers called the uncircumcised heart and what even a logical-minded, self-disciplined, monkish, musical village ʻpriestʻ like myself sometimes discovers in his own soul? With what weapons can we repel this interior wilderness? How can we overcome our dark desires to dominate others, to humiliate them, to subjugate them, to make them dependent on us, to chain and enslave them with the gossamer threads of guilt, shame, and even gratitude?"

- - (from the penultimate chapter of A Perfect Peace by Amos Oz: The musings of "Srulik", an incoming
secretary of a kibbutz).

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." (Frederic Bastiat)

The Law is a work of genius.

"Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm X predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed."

-Chris Hedges, TRUTHDIG

The great Howard Zinn:

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/howard_zinn_have_a_more_interesting_life_20...

"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people - that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature."

James Thurber

"Usually the artist has two life-long companions, neither of his own choosing… — poverty and loneliness. To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience. It takes only one friend, if he is a man of faith, to work miracles." (Henry Miller)

To Norman Rosten:

December 1, 1959

"I'm still pissed off at you for writing me nasty letters, not because I may not deserve them, but because I wonder how often you write letters to the mighty Arthur Miller, known forever to the Jungian archetypes of my unconscious as Marilyn Monroe's Negro mammy."

-- Norman Mailer Selected Letters of Norman Mailer

"Through the image is sustained an awareness of the infinite; the eternal within the infinite; the spiritual within matter, the limitless given form."

-Andrei Tarkovsky

"In his 2004 book What's The Matter With Kansas, journalist/historian Tom Frank asked rhetorically why blue-collar American voters so consistently vote against their own economic self-interests.

He concluded it's because they keep falling for the same old con job: A vote for me is a vote for Jesus, and to end abortions and gay marriage and pornography, and restore old-time values and give everybody the shot they deserve at the American dream.

Instead, they just wind up with crappier jobs and higher taxes (or "revenue enhancements").

"It's comical," Frank told me.

But that's what people seem to want. That's America."

-from a recent article by journalist Neil Macdonald

"Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it. This would doubtless be more heartening news were its veracity not quite so capricious. For upon inspection it is immediately apparent that life is at its most artistic when such a condition is least desired. It is, in fact, safe to assume that, more often than not, life imitates craft, for who among us can say that our experience does not more closely resemble a macramé plant holder than it does a painting by Seurat. When it comes to art, life is the biggest copycat in the matter of the frame."

-Fran Lebowitz, 'Arts' from Metropolitan Life

>38 CliffBurns: Sadly, it also seems to be so here, Cliff.

"I will not shrink from the price that has to be paid, Mimir," said Odin All-Father.

"Then drink," said Mimir. He filled up a great horn with water from the well and gave it to Odin.

Odin took the horn in both his hands and drank and drank. And as he drank all the future became clear to him. He saw all the sorrows and troubles that would fall upon Men and Gods. But he saw, too, why the sorrows and troubles had to fall, and he saw how they might be borne so that Gods and Men, by being noble in the days of sorrow and trouble, would leave in the world a force that one day, a day that was far off indeed, would destroy the evil that brought terror and sorrow and despair into the world.

Then when he had drunk out of the great horn that Mimir had given him, he put his hand to his face and he plucked out his right eye. Terrible was the pain that Odin All-Father endured. But he made no groan nor moan. He bowed his head and put his cloak before his face, as Mimir took the eye and let it sink deep, deep into the water of the Well of Wisdom. And there the Eye of Odin stayed, shining up through the water, a sign to all who came to that place of the price that the Father of the Gods had paid for his wisdom.

From
THE CHILDREN OF ODIN, The Book of Northern Myths
By Padraic Colum

"No more I'll tell how Siegfried wooed his wife; hear now the tale of how King Gunther lay by Lady Brunhild's side. The stately knight had often lain more soft by other dames. The courtiers now had left, both maid and man. The chamber soon was locked; he thought to caress the lovely maid. Forsooth the time was still far off, ere she became his wife. In a smock of snowy linen she went to bed. Then thought the noble knight: "Now have I here all that I have ever craved in all my days." By rights she must needs please him through her comeliness. The noble king gan shroud the lights and then the bold knight hied him to where the lady lay. He laid him at her side, and great was his joy when in his arms he clasped the lovely fair. Many loving caresses he might have given, had but the noble dame allowed it. She waxed so wroth that he was sore a-troubled; he weened that they were lovers, but he found here hostile hate. She spake: "Sir Knight, pray give this over, which now ye hope. Forsooth this may not hap, for I will still remain a maid, until I hear the tale; now mark ye that."

Then Gunther grew wroth; he struggled for her love and rumpled all her clothes. The high-born maid then seized her girdle, the which was a stout band she wore around her waist, and with it she wrought the king great wrong enow. She bound him hand and foot and bare him to a nail and hung him on the wall. She forbade him love, sith he disturbed her sleep. Of a truth he came full nigh to death through her great strength.

Then he who had weened to be the master, began to plead. 'Now loose my bands, most noble queen. I no longer trow to conquer you, fair lady, and full seldom will I lie so near your side.'

She reeked not how he felt, for she lay full soft. There he had to hang all night till break of day, until the bright morn shone through the casements. Had he ever had great strength, it was little seen upon him now.

'Now tell me, Sir Gunther, would that irk you aught,' the fair maid spake, 'and your servants found you bound by a woman's hand?'

Then spake the noble knight: 'That would serve you ill; nor would it gain me honor,' spake the doughty man. 'By your courtesie, pray let me lie now by your side. Sith that my love mislike you so, I will not touch your garment with my hands.'

Then she loosed him soon and let him rise. To the bed again, to the lady he went and laid him down so far away, that thereafter he full seldom touched her comely weeds. Nor would she have allowed it."

The Nibelungenlied
Translated by Daniel B. Shumway

A fun, thought provoking read:

“'Let's talk about genre': Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation"

"I have a mad theory that I started evolving when I read a book called Hard Core by Linda Williams, a film professor in California. It was one of the first books analysing hardcore pornography as a film genre.

She said that in order to make sense of it, you need to think of musicals, because the plot in a musical exists to stop all of the songs from happening at once, and to get you from song to song. You need the song where the heroine pines for what she does not have, you need the songs where the whole chorus is doing something rousing and upbeat, and you need the song when the lovers get together and, after all the vicissitudes, triumph.

I thought, “That’s actually a way to view all literary genres,....” --- Neil Gaiman

http://www.newstatesman.com/2015/05/neil-gaiman-kazuo-ishiguro-interview-literat...

From an unpublished essay by author Joy Williams:

‘‘Was it only a dream that Literature was once dangerous, that it had the power to awaken and change us? Surely it must be, become, dangerous now. ... Behold the mystery, the mysterious, undeserved beauty of the world.’’

Here's the quote from literary maverick Alexander Trocchi I posted on my blog this morning:

“And that had been with me for as long as I could remember, gaining in intensity at each new impertinence of the external world with which I signed no contract when I was ejected bloodily from my mother’s warm womb. I developed early a horror of all groups, particularly those which without further ado claimed the right to subsume all my acts under certain designations in terms of which they would reward or punish me. I could feel no loyalty to anything so abstract as a state or so symbolic as a sovereign. And I could feel nothing but outrage at a system in which, by virtue of my father’s name and fortune, I found myself from the beginning so shockingly underprivileged. What shocked me most as I grew up was not the fact that things were as they were, and with a tendency to petrify, but that others had the impertinence to assume that I would forebear to react violently against them.”

"We've blotted out nine-tenths of our experience," he said. "And then we force the world into the tiny space that remains, and everything outside that space we claim it doesn't exist. We claim that that's what's real, that space where we have power. But it's a lie. The world--God, don't you know how big it is?" They stood on top of the white hill, and he gestured toward the darkness all around.

from CELESTIS by Paul Park

"Even the big cow-mushrooms are not altogether meaningless; not a mere white emptiness in the eye. The big mushroom does not flower, it does not move, but there is something overturning in the look of it; it is a monster, a thing like a lung standing there alive and naked—a lung without a body."

Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil

"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part."

~Teaching a Stone To Talk by Annie Dillard ("Living Like Weasels")

"The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail."

Homage to Catalonia, Orwell

>19 CliffBurns: more on war
From LIMONOV, page 210 in hardcover edition.

"you learn more about life and people in two hours of war than in four decades of peace...war is dirty, sure, war is senseless, but come on! Civilian life is also senseless, in its sameness and its reasonableness and because it dulls the instincts. The truth is that no one dares speak aloud is that war is a pleasure, the greatest pleasure there is, otherwise it would stop immediately. Once you've tasted it, it's like heroin; you want more...The taste for war, real war, is as natural to man as the taste for peace, it's idiotic to want to eliminate it by repeating...that peace is good and war is evil. In fact, its like men and women, yin and yang: you need both".

Horrible statement on human nature but all too accurate, I fear.

as you had said above...sad but true.

I have known many "warriors", American soldiers from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,, Afghanistan who have related that the adrenalin rush "is like nothing you have ever felt". To be faced with death and surviving can be both intoxicating and devastating. Additionally, the bonds of comrades in arms are stronger than most.

I remember my late Mum saying that the months she spent (aged 19 yo.) escaping Latvia and in Berlin (Nov. 1944 - Mar 1945) With my Father and her Sister, felt
more intense/concentrated/? than the 15 years she had spent after the war in Europe and Australia. When she told me this.

"For look: the earth was thought to be flat. Indeed, it was true: between Paris and Asnieres, for example, it is still today.
But that hasn't prevented scientists proving conclusively that the world is round. And no one contests it.
In spite of this there's still an idea that life runs in a flat progression from birth to death.
But life too is probably round, and far greater in extent and capacity than the hemisphere which we know at present."

Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters of Post-Impressionist

ʻ
"I am firmly convinced that the
passionate will for justice and truth
has done more to improve manʻs
condition than calculating political
shrewdness which in the long run
only breeds general distrust. Who can
doubt that Moses was a better leader of
humanity than Machiavelli?"

-- Albert Einstein quoted in The Philosophy of
Albert Einstein: Writings on Art, Science
and Peace. Ed. by Walt Martin
and Magda Ott

A great quote from a news story today:

"The first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket had a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" on a floating barge following the successful launch of two satellites Wednesday."

Er...you mean it CRASHED?

Probably! SpaceX has been fantastic for coming out with fun quotes that journalists love to use. Coming from them, I'd take this as tongue-in-cheek euphemism rather than a dodge. A far cry from NASA.

...or the U.S. military, which comes up with all sorts of clever euphemisms for disastrous defeat and policy snafus--"IED" instead of land mine or booby trap, "strategic retreat" instead of let-s-get-the-hell-out-of-here...

“The little man or woman, they’re not heroes. They’re not great leaders. They are everyday men and women-ordinary people. I was thinking of little people, because I was thinking: Why do ordinary people disappear without a trace? Why doesn’t anyone ask them anything? Nobody asks them what they think about grand ideas. They’re just asked to die for them”

Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Laureate, Author, Voices From Chernobyl, Secondhand Time: The Last of The Soviets

“For me, emotion is a path toward self-knowledge, not just an occasion to cry”

Svetlana Alexievich

"What is the meaning of human life, or, for
that matter, of the life of any creature? To
know an answer to this question means to be
religious. You ask: Does it make any sense,
then, to pose this question. I answer: the
man who regards his own life and that of his
fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely
unhappy but unfit for life.
. . . . . The true value of a human being is
determined primarily by the measure and the
sense in which he has attained liberation from
the self."

from Mein Weltbild by Albert Einstein

A bit of modern lit for you, dear reader:

"Family is no doubt a pier glass for one’s own self-contempt. But for all my regret that this should happen now, for all my frustration and incomprehension, those feelings, I knew, had to be set next to my own meager participation in these lives, the implicit idea that it was enough for me to show up now and again for a few days and assume the unencumbered neutrality that may, in fact, have been no different from my habitual absence."

From Prodigals by Greg Jackson

I'm STILL laughing at "rapid unscheduled disassembly"!!!

NASA will no doubt make it an acronym and use it: RUD.

From the poet, Mary Oliver:

"It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist."

>63 CliffBurns: Do not ask who is the person from Porlock. The person from Porlock is thee.

Funny, I've often cited that Coleridge analogy to people (friends, etc.) when I tell them how much I hate the telephone and don't like people calling me during daytime hours. Chances are, they're interrupting my writing, breaking my chain of thought.

I was looking up a political quote from Kurt Vonnegut and also came across this:

"But then again there is the humanistic Vonnegut, honorary president of the Humanist Association: In A Man Without a Country, he repeats something his Uncle Alex used to say when they were sitting under an apple tree, chatting and drinking lemonade.

"Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.' "

It is a saying he now carries around with him, and he urges everyone to "please notice when you are happy."

We had chairs under an apple tree in our yard as a kid and visitors would often remark in the same manner while sipping iced tea - so it goes.

>66 DugsBooks: Take time to smell the roses.

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will." (Charles Baudelaire)

Gotta like 19th century white male historians. This is William H. Prescott on Mexican women:

"The women are described by the Spaniards as pretty, unlike their unfortunate descendants of the present day, though with the same serious and rather melancholy cast of countenance."

I posted this quote from Colson Whitehead's THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD on Facebook:

"List upon list crowded the ledger of slavery. The names gathered first on the African coat in tens of thousands of manifests. That human cargo. The names of the dead were as important as the names of the living, as every loss from disease or suicide--and other mishaps labeled as such for accounting purposes--needed to be justified to employers. At the auction block they tallied the souls purchased at each auction, and on the plantations the overseers preserved the names of workers in rows of tight cursive. Every name an asset, breathing capital, profit made flesh."

from the film 'About Elly" written and directed by the Iranian filmmaker, Asghar Farhadi:

when asked why his marriage ended a character responds...

" A bitter ending is better than endless bitterness"

"The story of Eden is the story of history's first drug bust."

-Terence McKenna

I am John Clare, I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly.

- John Clare

Not One Day review

The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Oulipo-author Anne Garréta's 2002 prix Médicis-winning Not One Day, just (about) out in English from Deep Vellum.
Choice quote from the book:

"For life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don't love."

Though with the PEN World Voices Festival looming ahead -- next week, in NYC -- this one sticks out too:

"As a rule, it's not a good idea to line writers up in a room and entice them to talk. It's enough to turn you off of literature."

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)

A recent interview with John Le Carre concludes with the following remark from the author, who is now 85:

"I feel that I’m just about grown up enough to face the truth about myself."

Wonderful.

Gord found this one, a recent Twitter post from author John Banville:

John Banville‏ @John_Banville Nov 24

A phone call from my agent asking if I've heard whether I'm up for the Bad Sex award.
"But how could they possibly know?" I ask.
"It's the bad sex in fiction award, John," he says.
Pause.
"Of course. I knew that."

"In Ireland, anything can happen to anybody at any time, and it usually does."

From, The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn Wall.

Read this today on Language Log

“While not all social stereotypes are false, my general observation is that the process of social stereotype formation is remarkably insensitive to real-world statistics, because it follows the rules of emotionally-loaded confirmation bias.”

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=35528

'Nil credam et omnia cavebo' has been stuck in my mind for many years though I've no idea where I read it. Collection of quotations, probably. Certainly not in a book written in Latin.

Fortis Fortuna Adiuvio - John Wick 2

"And during recess he would walk around kicking stones, and always by himself, because the judge that that was somewhere inside all of us had long ago condemned him to a life of exile."

-Stig Dagerman, "Salted Meat and Cucumber" (short story)

“There’s no consistent approach. There’s no way in which I’ve mastered writing a novel.”

-Philip Roth

"I look at my past life as at a field lit up by the sun when it breaks through the clouds, and I note with metaphysical astonishment how my most deliberate acts, my clearest ideas and my most logical intentions were after all no more than congenital drunkenness, inherent madness and huge ignorance. I didn’t even act anything out. I was the role that got acted. At most, I was the actor’s motions."

-Fernando Pessoa

(Applause)

Aurelius writes:
At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic— what defines a human being — is to work with others. Even animals know how to sleep. And it’s the characteristic activity that’s the more natural one — more innate and more satisfying.

>84 CliffBurns: here's that whole section:
http://www.freebooks8.com/Fiction_Library/3561/22.html

Bernando Soares (Pessoa) on authors of occultist texts:

"What really shocks me is how these wizards and masters of the invisible, when they write to communicate or intimate their mysteries, all write abominably. It offends my intelligence that a man can master the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language. Why should dealing with demons be easier than dealing with grammar? If through long exercises of concentration and willpower one can have so-called astral visions, why can’t the same person – applying considerably less concentration and willpower – have a vision of syntax?"

>87 mejix: I am a member of Clarity, the association for clear legal writing, and I am so stealing that quotation!

>88 haydninvienna:

Glad you liked. The quote made me chuckle. Here's the whole section:

http://www.freebooks8.com/Fiction_Library/3561/84.html

>89 mejix: Thanks. I've never read Pessoa but I may just have to do so now.

More Bernardo Soares (Pessoa). This time being a bad boy:

“Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘civic duty’, ‘solidarity’, ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.

I recently saw in a toy-shop window some objects that reminded me exactly of what these expressions are: make-believe dishes filled with make-believe tidbits for the miniature table of a doll. For the real, sensual, vain and selfish man, the friend of others because he has the gift of speech and the enemy of others because he has the gift of life, what is there to gain from playing with the dolls of hollow and meaningless words?”

Good, honest cynicism.

Love it.

This image of the toy dishes is just so perfect, specially for a certain kind of uptight progressivism.

"Soldiers die time and again without ever knowing who won..."

Mahmoud Darwish, "The Dice Player".

(Translated by Rema Hammami & John Berger)

"A schlechter shalom is besser wie a gutter krieg." / "A BAD peace is
better than a GOOD war." --Jewish proverb

"But curiosity is itself a form of hope."

-Madison Smartt Bell, STRAIGHT CUT

"This was the opposite of integrity, the opposite of an act of art, for an act of art is precisely seeking something that can't be said or done any other way, and which disregards the thoughts and opinions of others, is in fact entirely independent of them" Karl Ove Knausgaard

"Poetry is the province either of one who is naturally clever, or of one who is insane." -Aristotle

Not sure I agree with that, but an interesting quote...

From Foursome by Carolyn Burke, Stieglitz being Stieglitz.

"Alfred proposed revisions to an earlier draft, which called him America's greatest artist: 'I know my own worth. But I'm not sure about being as much an artist as one of the leading spiritual forces in this country.' "

I'm reading Sir Francis Bacon's Essays. He had a lot of quotable lines, on many subjects:

'Death opens the door to good fame, and extinguishes envy.'

'Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses'

'It is impossible to love and to be wise'

'Empire is rare and hard to keep'

'A little philosophy inclines a man to atheism,
but depth in philosophy brings a man's mind to religion.'

'Whatsoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.'

'A crowd is not company'

And finally:

'I am Shakespeare' (just kidding)

"I don’t dream of possessing you. Why should I? It would only debase my dream life. To possess a body is to be banal. And to dream of possessing a body is perhaps even worse, if that’s possible: it’s to dream of being banal – the supreme horror. ...

Let us remain eternally like a male figure in one stained-glass window opposite a female figure in another stained-glass window… And between us humanity passing by, shadows whose footsteps coldly echo… Murmurs of prayers, secrets of ..... Sometimes the air fills up with incense. At other times a statuesque figure sprinkles holy water on this side and that side… And we will always be the same stained-glass windows, with the same colours when the sun strikes us, the same outlines when the night falls… The centuries will not touch our vitreous silence… In the world outside civilizations will come and go, revolutions will break out, feasts will whirl and rage, peaceful and orderly peoples will carry on… While we, my unreal love, will always have the same useless expression, the same false existence, and the same .....

Until one day, at the end of various centuries and empires, the Church will finally collapse and everything will cease…

But we, oblivious to it, will remain – I don’t know how, or in what space, or for how long – eternal stained-glass windows, hours of naïve design and coloration executed by some artist who for ages has slept in a Gothic tomb on which two angels, their hands pressed together, freeze the idea of death in marble."

Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa)
The Book of Disquiet

Love Pessoa.

"We are told to fear the 'extremists' who protest against ecocide and challenge dirty industry and the dirty governments it buys. But the extremists we should fear are those who hold office."

-George Monbiot

"And so the time has now come for us writers to shoulder our responsibility … Do we understand that it is we who, more resolutely than anyone, must now enter into battle against the forces of forgetfulness, against the slow and implacable flow of the river of time?"

-Vasily Grossman, STALINGRAD

In The Mill on the Floss George Eliot calls the Devil 'the Father of Lawyers.'

Later, one character is shocked when another character talks about the Devil: 'He was beginning to feel rather uncomfortable at these free remarks on the personal appearance of a being powerful enough to create lawyers'

"We marvel at devils and foxes: we do not marvel at man. But who is it that causes a man to move and to speak?—to which question comes the ready answer of each individual so questioned, ‘I do.’ This ‘I do,’ however, is merely a personal consciousness of the facts under discussion. For a man can see with his eyes, but he cannot see what it is that makes him see; he can hear with his ears, but he cannot hear what it is that makes him hear; how, then, is it possible for him to understand the rationale of things he can neither see nor hear. Whatever has come within the bounds of their own ocular or auricular experience men regard as proved to be actually existing; and only such things."

From Tang Meng Lai's preface to Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio by Songling Pu

...... Michael Gerhardt, the UNC professor and constitutional law expert who testified to the House Judiciary Committee that Trump’s actions merited impeachment.

“The histrionics of the Republican members, he said, reminded him of poet Carl Sandburg’s oft-cited quote: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.””

Read more here: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article238567638.html#storylink=cpy

>106 DugsBooks:, Boswell said Samuel Johnson approached his literary criticism arguments in a similar manner. Seemed to work, lol.

"If you look for meaning, you'll miss everything that happens."

-Andrei Tarkovsky

(Thanks, Gord)

"The writer’s job will always remain the same: to master the rigors of the craft; to embrace complexity while holding fast to simple principles; to stand alone if need be; to tell the truth."

-George Packer

Peter Schjeldahl on Andy Warhol:

"Pleasure and alienation aren't two sides of a coin in his work; they are the same side, a sleek, transparent surface with nothing-- black-hole-in-space nothing --behind it. His art superimposes our gawking reflections on bottomless want."

and on Velazquez:

"We can use Velazquez for remembering how to love life: directly, with an attentiveness and a responsiveness that drive thoughts of 'love' and 'life' out of our heads and consume us like a clear flame. How to make inanimate matter, such as paint, dance attendance-- as if the flame painted the pictures --is a secret probably lost forever, but we won't be wrong in taking it as a compliment. One of us did that."

From Mad Enchantment by Ross King:

"Monet did, however make regular trips to Paris. One thing that could always entice him was the prospect of eating oysters with friends at the restaurant Prunier in the Rue Duphot--the most fashionable seafood restaurant in Paris-- as well as going to wrestling matches. 'The effort is always a beautiful thing," he said of wrestling."

The idea of Monet booing at a wrestling match made my day.

From "Fifteen Epigrams in Praise of the Tyrant' by Paavo Haakivvo

14.
How decisively
one's brief moments of clear insight
are ameliorated
by good, plausible ideology.

"All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility."

Norman Finkelstein

"Ideological cleansing, I would note, exists not only under totalitarian regimes—­it is also present, in a different form, in liberal Western democracies. Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed and too often replaced by empty political slogans."

Ai Weiwei, 1000 YEARS OF JOYS AND SORROWS

Ideological cleansing in totalitarian regimes = jackboots and secret prisons.

Ideological cleansing in western liberal democracies = someone complained about my tweet.

“Evil is unspectacular and always human, / And shares our bed and eats at our own table.”

W. H. Auden, from “Herman Melville”

'Fuck off, Russian warship.'
.'

Till this week the epitome of loathing, final dismissal for me was a London actor interrupting his lines mid-play,saying 'Fuck this for a game of soldiers' and walking off stage never to return. It no longer is.

“I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.”

J.A. Baker in The Peregrine

“I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies. Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.”

-Alan Moore

Long time New York film critic A.O. Scott is switching to book reviews because he's sick and tired of being harassed by idiot fans:

“I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.”

A.O. Scott

Nick Cave, in NME, referencing "cancel culture":

"If you start looking around for the good people who make good art, the conversation shuts down very quickly. All the great stuff seems to be made by people who are in some way, out of order in some way or another."

“Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.”

Raymond Chandler, THE HIGH WINDOW