February 2012
7 posts
4 tags
“Officials in key parts of the Obama administration are increasingly convinced...”
– US officials believe Iran sanctions will fail, making military action likely by Chris McGreal, the guardian.
5 tags
“Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no...”
– In praise of shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki
5 tags
“All I can come up with are stray sentences, he said, maybe because reality seems...”
– Antwerp, Roberto Bolano
6 tags
“Now a book lives as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is fathomed, it dies at...”
– From Apocalypse by D.H. Lawrence. Via Biblioklept.
4 tags
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“She was getting sweaty because the windows were up as these words tumbled out of...”
– From Quality Street by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
6 tags
January 2012
13 posts
6 tags
5 tags
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“I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying...”
– From The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace.
6 tags
“The young man’s knees failed, and his heart;
he lost his grip upon the...”
– The murder of Prince Lycaon, after he begs for his life. From The Iliad, trans. by Fitzgerald.
7 tags
“The bare steppe, the deserted site, the snow sparkling in the moonlight. The...”
– From One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
6 tags
“One night, I watched mothers throw their babies into the sea. They popped up...”
– From Everyone is an Immigrant by Eliza Griswold in Poetry Magazine.
7 tags
“A wizard, grand and wondrous, lived here - Telemos
a son of Eurymos; great...”
– Kyklops to Odysseus. From The Odyssey by Homer, trans. by Fitzgerald.
6 tags
“The immense power of television brought about more enlightenment than they had...”
– From Behind the Rise of the Great Powers by Liu Xiaobo in Guernica.
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“The everything,” I said. “The sense of living an inner life right up...”
– From End Zone by Don DeLillo.
6 tags
“Under white clouds, cielo di Pisa
out of all this beauty something must come”
– From Canto LXXXIV in The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound.
4 tags
“Others will dream that I am mad, while I dream of the Zahir.”
– From ‘The Zahir’ by Jorge Luis Borges.
6 tags
“Surely we would be better off if we put an end to our obsession with endings....”
– From A Point of View: The endless obsession with what might be by John Gray.
5 tags
“One is seeking something that is impossible to find or about which nothing is...”
– From ‘The first approach of the unconscious’ in Man and his Symbols. Edited by Carl Jung.
December 2011
24 posts
5 tags
“Under the swish and the sweep,
mermaids on piano play the bottom line.”
– From Hourglass by Brad Frederiksen.
5 tags
4 tags
desolant asked: in·ter·ro·gate :: There are multiple techniques employed in interrogation including deception, torture, increasing suggestibility, and the use of mind-altering drugs. Deception can form an important part of effective interrogation.
3 tags
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“Cold night smell
coming in the windows. New moon floating white as a rib at the...”
– From Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson.
5 tags
ringo-n:
No such man as he, by Tristan Foster:
I hope I’m happy. […]
The fear and worship of a god is a fear and worship of the nothing, and I think you know this. That voice you spend your life waiting to hear, which you wait for only in those moments when you think it will come, is the voice of your fear.
Feeling somewhat obliged to reblog this.
8 tags
“What does it matter, after all, if margarine is just fat, when it goes further...”
– From ‘Operation Margarine’ in Mythologies by Roland Barthes.
6 tags
“In secular psychodevelopmental terms, an epiphany is a sudden, life-changing...”
– From ‘Adult World’ in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace.
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“Soul, small wandering one,
my lifelong companion,
where will you go
— numb,...”
– From Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian by David Malouf.
7 tags
Stop now
because what you are doing is pointless. Instead, read Tragedy: A Curious Art Form by Anne Carson. Then re-read it. Then re-read it again.
With thanks, ultimately, to le proustitute.
4 tags
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“I have felt during these last days of waiting an added sense of perplexity due...”
– To Harriet Shaw Weaver - 20 July 1919. From Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellman.
6 tags
“You work in unconsciousness like you work in electronics or metallurgy. You have...”
– From The Anti-Oedipus Papers by Felix Guattari.
8 tags
“He had never dwelled on memory’s delights. Impressions slid over him, vivid but...”
– From ‘The Maker’ in Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges. Trans. by Mildred Boyer.
8 tags
“Amphibians are teaching us lessons about the state of our planet. Waves of...”
– From Lessons of the Lost by Joseph R. Mendelson III in American Scientist.
8 tags
“The demons told me that there is a hell for the sentimental and the pedantic....”
– The False Swedenborg, Dreams (1873). From Extraordinary Tales by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares.
8 tags
“I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re...”
– David Foster Wallace to David Lipsky. From Smarter than You Think, a review of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky. By Wyatt Mason in NYRB.
7 tags
“A young Persian gardener said to his Prince:
“Save me! I met death this...”
– From Le Grand Ecart by Jean Cocteau in Extraordinary Tales by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares.
7 tags
“Damn it, we’re going to crash… This can’t be happening!”
– Final words from David Robert, co-pilot of Air France Flight 447. From What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 in Popular Mechanics Magazine.
7 tags
“Olav Velthuis, a Dutch sociologist who wrote Talking Prices, the best study of...”
– From ‘Why Is Art So Damned Expensive?’ by Blake Gopnik. http://www.thedailybeast.com//content/newsweek/2011/12/04/why-is-art-so-damned-expensive.html
6 tags
“The astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally...”
– From The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich.
Not sure what. I’m not sure what to tell you.
5 tags
“All around us, entombed in cubicles, suspended in time, reliably muted now, men...”
– From ‘Hammer and Sickle’ in The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo.
November 2011
19 posts
5 tags
“‘Imagine a surface of no colour whatsoever,’ he said.”
– Igauskas. From ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’ by Don DeLillo.
5 tags
“And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets...”
– From ‘The Angel Esmeralda’ by Don DeLillo.
6 tags
“We give the gods a name and they quicken in us, they rise in their glory and...”
– From An Imaginary Life by David Malouf.
10 tags
“By turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, it...”
– From ‘Commitment’ by Theodor Adorno. Discovered in Beyond Grief and Grievance: The poetry of 9/11 and its aftermath by Philip Meters.
5 tags
“She looked for something in people’s faces that might tell her their...”
– From ‘The Ivory Acrobat’ in The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo.
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“The best of new places had to be protected from our own cries of delight. We...”
– From ‘Creation’ in The Angel Esmeralda by Don Delillo.