Blinking Twelve
Mostly quotations. Curated by Semi since back when my VCR (yes) was blinking twelve.
Wednesday, November 06, 2024
Vaclav Havel
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.
Sunday, September 08, 2024
Ted Chiang in the New Yorker
Sunday, September 01, 2024
Philip Larkin
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Friday, August 30, 2024
Tuesday, August 20, 2024
Yael van de Woudon, The Safekeep
Thursday, August 15, 2024
James Baldwin in Life Magazine, May 1963
Thursday, August 08, 2024
C.S.Lewis, The Four Loves
Sunday, August 04, 2024
Ron Padgett, "The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World"
Thursday, August 01, 2024
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Monday, July 15, 2024
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
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
Monday, July 08, 2024
Arthur Weasley, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling
Saturday, July 06, 2024
Wednesday, July 03, 2024
Friday, June 28, 2024
Lynda Barry (via Austin Kleon)
Friday, June 21, 2024
Friday, June 14, 2024
Nick Cave, "The Red Hand Files"
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
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, "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, "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?
Friday, April 26, 2024
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.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
Saturday, April 20, 2024
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.)
Sunday, April 14, 2024
W. H. Auden, Musee de Beaux Arts
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…
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Clyde Barrow, letter to Henry Ford, from Letters of Note
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