Truth and falsity properly considered are properties of language, not of images.
Errol Morris in conversation with Lawrence Weschler.
Tag: quotes
The Light by Which You See
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
Flannery O’Connor in “Writing Short Stories” from her collection Mystery and Manners. (via malevichsquare) Filed under Flannery O’Connor.
I feel like inspiring political moments these days are just spank-material for aspiring typesetters.
KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT.
Daniel Mendelsohn. More Mendelsohn.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. (via). Cf. Victor Hugo:
Let’s not bring flame where light is enough.
And Jay-Z:
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.
Meal entering vehicle window = tacky, suburban, boring, junk food. Meal exiting vehicle window = cool, urban, hip, adventurous.
Striptease has become less interesting since they did away with the costumes. It’s become Newtonian. The movement of bodies through space, period. It can get boring.
Preface otherwise banal life wisdom with “My father once taught me…” (or similar) and it then becomes rich with generational credibility.
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (via malevichsquare) Cf. George Saunders:
If I just stay fully engaged in whatever has presented itself, things will be fine. That is, I try not to think about things like: Next, I begin MY NOVEL!
Forms, styles, structures–whatever word you prefer–should change like skirt lengths. They have to; otherwise we make a rule, a religion of one form; we say, “This form here, this is what reality is like,” and it pleases us to say that (…) because it means we don’t have to read anymore, or think, or feel.
Zadie Smith, in an essay on George Eliot and the Victorians and the evolution of the novel and such.
On the other side of the class and educational divide (…) it’s easy to forget what it’s like not to know.
Zadie Smith, in an essay on E.M. Forster collected in Changing My Mind. The context is whether or not readers pick up on literary/cultural references. It made me think of Ezra Klein.
The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et cetera. It’s a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime. I know one, Pnin, having read it half a dozen times. When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through the kitchen (Pnin a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon Lolita), or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their methodology). Even the architect’s claim on his creation seems secondary to your wonderful way of living in it.
Zadie Smith, opening an essay on two opposing philosophies of the reader-writer relationship, pitting Barthes vs. Nabokov. Collected in Changing My Mind, which I recommend. I’ll probably post some more quotes from this book in the near future.
All any of us want on our graves is “HERE LIES THE PERSON WITH THE UNIQUEST OPINIONS.”
DC Pierson. I love my opinions tag so much.
Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue w/ your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years
Age and experience will slowly whittle away at your dreams, so don’t do that to yourself. Let other people do that to you.
One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.
Pornography is not directly obscene: it excites only as long as there is a struggle within the viewer between lust and the angel of culture.
Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what’s done is done.
Lady Macbeth, Buddhist/Stoic. Cf. Palladas.
Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’?
Lady Macbeth, suggesting you be less of a wimp. Cf. Seneca:
You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.
Nought’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content
Lady Macbeth has a lot of good lines.
Mark Larson 