Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
Tag: quotes
The difference is between sitting around listening to music and partying to music. You can’t just be walking back and forth on stage, otherwise it could just be a seminar.
Lil Scrappy on crunk, quoted in Dirty South. You could say that the music happens between fans and stars rather than between listeners and musicians. And like Little Steven says, performance relies on a working-class energy. And then there’s Elijah Wald’s observation that critics tend to be people that collect and discuss music, rather than dance to it.
What punk was to rock, crunk is to rap.
There are, for example, only two reasons for children to go to school – apart, that is, from acquiring the werewithal to earn a living: to make friends, and to see if they can find something of absorbing interest to themselves.
Adam Phillips. I’ve quoted this before, but it’s worth a repeat. More wisdom in the Adam Phillips tag. My favorite bits from his book On Kindness.
I come from a classical background. I came up singing Italian sonnets, Negro spirituals, and shit of that nature.
Pimp C, quoted in Dirty South.
Put This On: On Gay Talese & Limited Budgets
Perhaps you should consider consuming less, but consuming something special. Prioritizing something that pays a person who is creating a product that approaches art, rather than approaching widget.
You know how they make us look on TV? Like we live on the front porch with flies and shit flying around us, with our stomachs all big eating watermelon rinds? That ain’t us, man. We’re smart, man. Our life is slowed down so we don’t miss nothing. When shit gets moving too fast you miss everything.
Scarface, quoted in Dirty South.
I don’t want to say it was cool, [but] the girls was cool in school.
Big Boi, quoted in Dirty South.
Let’s not bring flame where light is enough.
Victor Hugo in Les Miserables. (via)
Most of my days involve four- and five-hour stretches of what I would characterize as dicking around on the Internet.
Jesse Thorn. (via)
The value of physical pain is that it is finite. It ends when the ailment ends. We can use this as an opportunity to push on through, with the safety net of knowing it will eventually be over. It is practice.
Ryan Holiday. Just this weekend I was talking about the value of exercise qua mild self-harm. This is more articulate than I was.
The buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed – they buy little dreams.
Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, which I haven’t read but got the quote from Tyler Cowen’s so-far excellent The Age of the Infovore. See also social objects.
There are few if any awkward silences on Facebook.
You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.
Jay-Z. Gotta say, I really liked his book. And it was only last December that I started paying decent attention to his music.
This continuous modification of man by his own technology stimulates him to find continuous means of modifying it; man thus becomes the sex organs of the machine world just as the bee is of the plant world, permitting it to reproduce and constantly evolve to higher forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s devotion by rewarding him with goods and services and bounty.
When we get better at expressiveness, we get better at understanding, better at sympathy, better at bullshit-detection, better at experiencing pleasure, better at true engagement (with others, with the world, with ourselves).
George Saunders. Which reminds me of one of my oft-quoted favorite Phrases to Live By: “If you write like porridge you will think like it, and the other way around.”
God forbid we should wake up one day and know exactly what we’re doing.
The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker’s. I don’t know what’s inside; maybe it’s nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences — until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.
It’s hard to beat the entertainment value of people who deliberately misunderstand the world, people dying to be insulted, running around looking for a bullet to get in front of.
Most things are hideous at birth.
@nikastates. I don’t personally know the person that said this, but it got the @millsbaker/Mills retweet endorsement and it strikes me as very wise.
Mark Larson 