February 2012
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It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
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And meanwhile we are adding thirteen million human beings to the population every month! Thirteen million more people to kill each other in competition over finite resources! And wipe out every other living thing along the way! It is a perfect fucking world as long as you don’t count every other species in it! We are a cancer on the planet! A cancer on the planet!
- Jonathan Franzen,...
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Just because a person isn’t making good use of her life, it doesn’t stop her life from passing. In fact, it makes her life pass all the quicker.
- Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
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And TV: TV was like radio, only ten times worse. The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter fully deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it.
- Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
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A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast...
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The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
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This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.
- Cormac...
January 2012
16 posts
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WatchA new literary icon.
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Algernon Cadwallader - In Response to...
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“I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People. This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government. Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit...
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The lonely, like the fictive, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness - in fact there exist support and social groups for persons with precisely these attributes. Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other human beings.
- David Foster Wallace, “E...
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Haller’s sickness of soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but rather those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.
- Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
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The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it, Not to be born is the best for man; The end of toil is a bailiff’s order, Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.
- W.H. Auden
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December 2011
25 posts
Currently reading The Doors of Perception. My first and only new year’s resolution is to take mescaline. Maybe see a new country.
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Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
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I love to read. It keeps the noise of the world at bay.
- Art Garfunkel
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I’m generally not caught up with music but this year was full of consistently great releases. First time I’ve ever done this but this was 2011:
1. This Will Destroy You – Tunnel Blanket
2. Beirut – The Rip Tide
3. A Winged Victory For The Sullen – S/T
4. Iron and Wine – Kiss Each Other Clean
5. Algernon Cadwallader – Parrot Flies
6. Tim Hecker – Ravedeath, 1972
7. La Dispute – Wildlife
8. Zola...
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Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
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Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the...
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The worst thing to call somebody is crazy. It’s dismissive, ‘I don’t understand this person so they’re crazy.’ It’s bullshit. Those people are not crazy they’re strong people. Maybe that environment is a little sick.
- Dave Chappelle
November 2011
40 posts
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And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitudes.
- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
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