Ted Chiang in the New Yorker

The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as "money laundering for copyrighted data," which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there's no guilt associated with it because it's not clear even to you that you're copying.

Philip Larkin

on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

John D. MacDonald, The Drowner

I was so low I could walk under a gator without taking off my hat.

Yael van de Woudon, The Safekeep

That's what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never find out anything new about them ever.

James Baldwin in Life Magazine, May 1963

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.

[via James Clear]

C.S.Lewis, The Four Loves

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. 

(via James Clear)

Ron Padgett, "The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World"

What makes us so mean?

We are meaner than gorillas,

the ones we like to blame our genetic aggression on.

It is in our nature to hide behind what Darwin said about survival,

as if survival were the most important thing on earth.

It isn't.

...

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Frida Kahlo, letter

Frankly, I don't have the least ambition to be anybody. I don't care for people's pretentiousness, and I am in no way interested in becoming a "big shit."

Frida Kahlo
Letter to Dr. Leo Eloesser
15th March 1941

—Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera, by Gerry Souter

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Language of the Night

We read books to find out who we are.

 

Arthur Weasley, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

David Simon, The Wire

Come at the king, you best not miss.
— Omar

June Leaf



Jane Leaf

Lynda Barry (via Austin Kleon)

Sometimes we are so confused and sad that all we can do is glue one thing to another. Use white glue and paper from the trash, glue paper onto paper, glue scraps and bits of fabric, have a tragic movie playing in the background, have a comforting drink nearby, let the thing you are doing be nothing, you are making nothing at all, you are just keeping your hands in motion, putting one thing down and then the next thing down and sometimes crying in between.

Irish/Celtic proverb

When God made time, he made plenty of it.

Nick Cave, "The Red Hand Files"

They are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of you, unable to get in…The song will find its way to you. If you don't write it, someone else will. Is that what you want? If not, get to it.

Daniel Kahneman

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

Alice Munro in the Paris Review, 1994

 The vigilance has to be there all the time. Of course it wouldn’t matter if you did give up writing. It’s not the giving up of the writing that I fear. It’s the giving up of this excitement or whatever it is that you feel that makes you write. This is what I wonder: what do most people do once the necessity of working all the time is removed? Even the retired people who take courses and have hobbies are looking for something to fill this void, and I feel such horror of being like that and having that kind of life. The only thing that I’ve ever had to fill my life has been writing.

Alice Munro, "Open Secrets"

 You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

Alice Munro, "Too Much Happiness"

 Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

Alice Munro, "Dance of the Happy Shades"

 The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity.

Alice Munro, "Lives of Girls and Women"

 “There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It's true. Was true. You will want to have children, though.”

-- Del's mother

Alice Munro, "Lives of Girls and Women"

 Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self - my old, devious, ironic, isolated self - beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.

Alice Munro, "Lives of Girls and Women"

I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.

Alice Munro, "Wenlock Edge"

 I had a mean tongue.

But I meant no harm. Or hardly any harm.

Alice Munro, "Face"

I am convinced that my father looked at me, really saw me, only once. After that, he knew what was there.

Alice Munro, "Some Women"

 I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinchers and crinolines that could stand up by themselves, and when there was nothing much to be done about things like polio and leukemia. Some people who got polio got better, crippled or not, but people with leukemia went to bed, and, after some weeks’ or months’ decline in a tragic atmosphere, they died.

Alice Munro, "The Spanish Lady" [first posted 2005]

 Why is it a surprise that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man

I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win….

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. 

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

Habit is necessary; but it is the habit of having careless habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

(via James Clear)

 

Sylvia Plath, “Mad Girl’s Love Song”

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

W. H. Auden, Musee de Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along…

Clyde Barrow, letter to Henry Ford, from Letters of Note

Clyde Barrow to Henry Ford, 10th April 1934

While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got every other car skinned and even if my business hasn't been strictly legal it don't hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.

Clyde Barrow³
Letter to Henry Ford
10th April 1934

https://blinkingtwelve.blogspot.com

Mike Tyson

Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.

John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel (East of Eden)

I feel just worthless today. I have used every physical excuse not to work except fake illness. I have dawdled, gone to the toilet innumerable times, had many glasses of water. Really childish. I dread the next scene, dread it like hell. 

Tyler Cowen's first law (Marginal Revolution)

There is something wrong with everything.

  — Tyler Cowen

There is something wrong with everying.

— Margalo Goldbach, not applying it as a law

 

Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (via Samuel L. Jackson)

If my answers frighten you, Vincent, then you should cease asking scary questions.

Toni Morrison in keynote 1981

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

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereux

You'll find the shame is like the pain, you only feel it once.

— Marquise de Merteuil

 

Marie Kondo, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

To truly cherish the things that are important to you, 

you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose.

General James Mattis, Former United States Secretary of Defense

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled By Randomness

I detest the random use of borrowed wisdom.

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.

Sean Thomas Dougherty, "Why Bother"

Because right now, there is someone

out there with

a wound in the exact shape

of your words