“Happily, I have lived long enough to indulge in the four most beautiful words in the English language: I told you so.”
—gore vidal, adore adore
September 2010
“It is because of the body … that we can speak of morality as universal. The material body is what we share most significantly with the whole of the rest of our species, extended both in time and space. Of course it is true that our needs, desires, and sufferings are always culturally specific. But our material bodies are such that they are, indeed must be, in principle capable of feeling compassion for any others of their kind. It is on this capacity for fellow-feeling that moral values are founded; and this is based in turn on our material dependency on each other. Angels, if they existed, would not be moral beings in anything like our sense.”
—terry eagleton
August 2010
“That’s another thing about The Beatles - we worked like dogs to get it right”
—richard starkey
“In an infinite universe, every possible thing would happen, and it would happen an infinite number of times … ”
—how utterly tiresome
“The first thing to see to if you want to write well is to avoid doing bad writing, used thinking. The more positive requirements can be left till later, if only a little later.”
—kermode on martin amis
“So what happens is that when we hear a sound we don’t hear it consciously, but it has an effect on us, and that effect we sort of reprocess and render into an attribute of the visuals.”
—walter murch
“But also it’s really hard to judge what women would be like if they hadn’t been persecuted for the last five or six thousand or ten thousand years for any hint of infidelity.”
—salon
“
Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world pierced by a ray of sunlight, and suddenly it is evening.
- Salvatore Quasimodo
” —::: wood s lot :::
“Yes, I realize that they included Canada which is technically part of Buffalo, but you can’t rely on Canadians’ stated dating preferences if “Take Any Offer” isn’t available as one of the choices. Damn Canucks coming down here to steal our women. Strengthen the borders is all I’m saying.”
—the last psychiatrist. why is it so fun to pick on canucks.
“How about them political elites, huh? Five million bucks for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, 15K just to rent the air-conditioned shitters”
—joe bageant
“I don’t teach like Michaels. It would be hard to keep a job if I did. He read our stories aloud until the moment he didn’t care anymore. Then he would stop reading and ask us why he didn’t care anymore. Sometimes this took only two sentences.”
—on leonard michaels.
“The real difference between rich and regular people is that the rich serve such marvelous vegetables,” he once said. “Little fresh born things, scarcely out of the earth. Little baby corns, little baby peas, little lambs that have been ripped out of their mothers’ wombs.”
—truman capote
“Pat’s drunken younger brother, Rich, at the nationally televised funeral: “Pat isn’t with God. He’s fucking dead.”
—andrew o’hehir on “the tillman story”
“I’m pretty used to broadband Republican hypocrisy - the core of their power in politics, after all, is their utter and complete lack of shame -”
—william rivers pitt
“I wish all the patients in the world good luck, you’ll need it. Not because of the antipsychotics themselves, which will work or not, oblivious to doctor and diagnosis; but because of the doctors, who take little interest in examining the evidence behind their practice, and even less interest in reevaluating its core principles; and who lack the courage to even treat what they see, instead resorting to artificial, and wrong, paradigms and algorithms. There’s not even pseudoscience here. Psychiatry is being lead by the siren call of semiotics, and it is saying, follow me, I am made of words…”
—the last psychiatrist
“A national Harris poll this spring found that 57 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is in fact a Muslim (and, for good measure, 38 percent believe he is “doing many of the things that Hitler did,”) and 24 percent believe that Obama actually “may be the anti-Christ.”
—just shoot me. get it over with.
“Writing fifty years ago in The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon lamented ‘the unpreparedness of the elite, the lack of practical ties between them and the masses, their apathy, and, yes, their cowardice at the crucial moment in the struggle.’”
—has it been that long
“Death may be, is likely to be, a little too early or a little too late.”
—frank kermode quote, r.i.p
