Most things are hideous at birth.
@nikastates. I don’t know who this is, but it got the @millsbaker/Mills retweet endorsement and it strikes me as very wise.
Tag: quotes
Most things are hideous at birth.
@nikastates. I don’t know who this is, but it got the @millsbaker/Mills retweet endorsement and it strikes me as very wise.
Art elevates and refines and transforms experience. And sometimes it just fucks with you for the fun of it.
You can tell if it’s your own plan by how lost you feel. People who do their own plans feel lost most of the time. People who do other peoples’ plans feel on track most of the time.
I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I’m so far away from that life–now that I’ve got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers–that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be?
We erected one of the great cultural constructions of our times, the weekend, to make fun more culturally and institutionally available.
Envy works upon what is close at hand, and things that are far off we are more free to admire.
Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the applause of the populace. Just as it was started on its first day, so it will run; nowhere will it turn aside, nowhere will it delay.
He who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow. For what new pleasure is there that any hour can now bring? They are all known, all have been enjoyed to the full.
Seneca is my new jam.
Without the making of theories I am convinced there would be no observations.
–Charles Darwin.
(Via Sam Anderson’s sentence of the week. Been thinking about “we see what we’re looking for” in terms of writing, and especially blogging. I find that when I set up a tag, often it’s a hopeful gesture, as if I’m saying, “Two or three makes a pattern. I’ll bet there’s more. I’ll name this so I can keep track of it and then I’ll keep an eye out for things to add.” And when I start a book, it’s, “There’s something to this. Let’s give this a name and start working on it.” Then the real gathering begins…)
Reminds me of a favorite Justin Wehr quote: “‘Organizing’ is really just an ugly way of saying ‘drawing connections’.” Or like with photo captions, you can’t help but be influenced by the labels put on things…
Heaven knows! such lives as yours, though they should pass the limit of a thousand years, will shrink into the merest span; your vices will swallow up any amount of time.
Look back in memory and consider when you ever had a fixed plan, how few days have passed as you had intended, when you were ever at your own disposal, when your face ever wore its natural expression, when your mind was ever unperturbed, what work you have achieved in so long a life, how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!
Seneca. I’ll probably have a few more from this one soon…
There’s all this talk about “bias” in public radio … the real bias in public radio is against joy.
Roman Mars, lamenting the dwindling experimentation and serendipity in public radio. His show 99% Invisible is a good antidote. (via)
Philosophy and jokes proceed from the same impulse: to confound our sense of the way things are, to flip our worlds upside down, and to ferret out hidden, often uncomfortable, truths about life. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger.
Social occasions can work a certain magic. You see your friends in costumes and onstage as it were, and suddenly they turn from ordinarily familiar to strangely familiar: They achieve sudden glory.
Eva Brann. (via christmasgorilla)
It’s my theory that rock and roll happens between fans and stars, rather than between listeners and musicians—that you have to be a screaming teenager, at least in your heart, to know what’s going on.
Ellen Willis, quoted in The New Inquiry – Heroine: Ellen Willis on Rock Music. On a similar note, Daniel Mendelsohn says:
Strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even… Critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken.
See also both Little Steven and Elijah Wald on music and dancing.
Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn’t bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn’t start.
The more seriously I took everything, and how serious life was in general, the better laughs I got.
Buster Keaton. (via)
Without the perks, plain ol’ fame and fortune just ain’t worth the trouble.
Mark Larson 