Thursday, March 28, 2024

Toni Morrison in keynote 1981

We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writers movement—assertive, militant, pugnacious.

Friday, March 22, 2024

John Mulaney on Netflix Is a Joke

I don't even know what my body is for — besides taking my head from room to room.

Friday, January 19, 2024

John O’Hara, Letter to The New Yorker editor Harold Ross - 1939

I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money.


Sunday, January 14, 2024

T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding", The Four Quartets

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Warren Buffet quoting his friend Tom, a Book of Mentors

Forty years ago, Tom gave me one of the best pieces of advice I've ever received. He said, "Warren, you can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow." It's such an easy way of putting it. You haven't missed the opportunity. Just forget about it for a day.

Saturday, December 16, 2023

Raymond Chandler, “Requiem”

There is a moment after death, yet hardly a moment,

When the bright clothes hang in the scented closet

And the lost dream fades and slowly fades,

When the silver bottles and the glass and the empty mirror,

And three long hairs in a brush and a folded kerchief,

And the fresh made bed and the fresh, plump pillows

On which no head will lie,

Are all that is left of the long, wild dream.

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Sean Thomas Dougherty, "Why Bother"

Because right now, there is someone
out there with
a wound in the exact shape
of your words

Monday, November 27, 2023

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order to make of him a man who is also clothed by the state. Only, the whole question lies in the color. 

Monday, November 13, 2023

Margalo's pitches for senior quote

 I want to thank my chiropractor for always having my back.

I want to thank my nail tech for always holding my hand.

I want to thank my massage therapist for always making me feel kneaded.

Sunday, November 12, 2023

Tenor saxophonist Al Cohn [via Brian Chellas]

A gentle­man is someone who knows how to play an accordion, but doesn't.

Attributed to Henry Thoreau in Elmore Leonard, Cat Chaser [via Brian Chellas]

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

Lady Astor and Winston Churchill

LADY ASTOR: If I were married to you, I'd put poison in your coffee.

WINSTON CHURCHILL: If you were my wife, I'd drink it.


From Wilder, You All Spoken Here [via Brian Chellas]

If brains were dynamite he wouldn't have enough to blow his nose.

 

            If a bird had his brains he'd fly backwards.

 

            He's so ugly no fly'd ever land on him.

 

            Looks like he's been chewin' tobacco and spittin' in the wind.

 

            When he was a baby he was so ugly they fed him with a slingshot.

 

            She's so fat that if she had to haul ass she'd have to make two trips.

 

            [As tearful as] a child that's lost his chewing gum on a henhouse floor.

 

                        

Dean Acheson [via Brian Chellas]

Don't just do something, stand there.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of Seven Gables [via Brian Chellas]

The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so, by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters, in the deportment of those about them; . . . 

Ecclesiastes, 12:12 [via Brian Chellas]

. . . be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

 

Burma Shave ad [via Brian Chellas]

She kissed the hairbrush / by mistake. / She thought it was / her husband Jake.

 

Burma Shave ad [via Brian Chellas]

No lady likes / to dance or dine / accompanied by / a porcupine.

de Palfrey, in John le Carre, The Russia House [via Brian Chellas]

Just the usual triumph of the fattest, disguised as a rational deduction.

 

Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Copper Beeches” [via Brian Chellas]

Crime is common. Logic is rare.

Saint Augustine, Confessions, book 4, chapter 6 [via Brian Chellas]

I was at the same time thoroughly tired of living and extremely frightened of dying.

Monday, November 06, 2023

Friday, October 20, 2023

F Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

 The charm of knowledge would be small, were it not so much shame has to be overcome on the way to it.

Louise Gluck, “A Slip of Paper”

To get born, your body makes a pact with death,  
and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat—    
You get into bed alone. Maybe you sleep, maybe you never wake up.  
But for a long time you hear every sound.  
It's a night like any summer night; the dark never comes.   

Louise Gluck, “A Slip of Paper”

No one taught me how to care for my body.  
You grow up watched by your mother or grandmother.  
Once you're free of them, your wife takes over, but she's nervous,  
she doesn't go too far. So this body I have,  
that the doctor blames me for—it's always been supervised by women,  
and let me tell you, they left a lot out.

Thursday, October 19, 2023

Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (after Sophocles)

[…]

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

WH Auden, September 1, 1939



I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Reverend Lovejoy to Ned Flanders in The Simpsons (S8, E8, written by Steve Young)

Ned Flanders: Reverend, I need to know - is God punishing me?
Reverend Lovejoy: Oooohh… Short answer, 'yes' with an 'if'. Long answer 'no' with a 'but'.

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Friday, September 01, 2023

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period, the fatal phase of feminine reverie abandoned to itself, in which the isolated heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the vine which cling, as chance directs, to the capital of a marble column or to the post of a wine-shop: A rapid and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, be she rich or poor, for wealth does not prevent a bad choice; misalliances are made in very high circles, real misalliance is that of souls; and as many an unknown young man, without name, without birth, without fortune, is a marble column which bears up a temple of grand sentiments and grand ideas, so such and such a man of the world satisfied and opulent, who has polished boots and varnished words, if looked at not outside, but inside, a thing which is reserved for his wife, is nothing more than a block obscurely haunted by violent, unclean, and vinous passions; the post of a drinking-shop.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

There are meditations which may be called vertical; when one is at the bottom of them, time is required to return to earth.

Sunday, July 23, 2023

Eleanor Roosevelt

Because from much further back I had had to face certain difficulties, until I decided to accept the fact that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is, and you cannot live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be.

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Victor Huge, Les Misérables

To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne, and the mitre in the name of the altar; it is to ill-treat the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry; it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

At the same time that there is an infinite without us, is there not an infinite within us? Are not these two infinites (what an alarming plural!) superposed, the one upon the other? Is not this second infinite, so to speak, subjacent to the first? Is it not the latter's mirror, reflection, echo, an abyss which is concentric with another abyss? Is this second infinity intelligent also? Does it think? Does it love? Does it will? If these two infinities are intelligent, each of them has a will principle, and there is an I in the upper infinity as there is an I in the lower infinity. The I below is the soul; the I on high is God.

Friday, April 07, 2023

E.B. White, letter to Miss R., 1973

You ask, "Who cares?" Everybody cares. You say, "It's been written before." Everything has been written before.

E.B. White, letter to Miss R., 1973

You ask, "Who cares?" Everybody cares. You say, "It's been written before." Everything has been written before.

Thursday, April 06, 2023

Carl Jung

"The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you."

Monday, April 03, 2023

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

The Voltairians added, "Will Boulatruelle catch the devil, or will the devil catch Boulatruelle?" The old women made a great many signs of the cross.

Thursday, February 23, 2023

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

[Javert] halted a few paces in the rear of the mayor's armchair, and there he stood, perfectly erect, in an attitude almost of discipline, with the cold, ingenuous roughness of a man who has never been gentle and who has always been patient; he waited without uttering a word, without making a movement, in genuine humility and tranquil resignation, calm, serious, hat in hand, with eyes cast down…

Wednesday, February 01, 2023

Paul Eldridge [source?]

A man will die for an idea, provided the idea is not quite clear to him.

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language - six rules for writers

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

José Esteban Muñoz

Queerness "allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. …We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds," he added. "Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world."