One reason that cats are happier than people
—Gwendolyn Brooks
is that they have no newspapers…
—from “In the Mecca”
—found in In the Mecca (1964)
WORK
Concise, compelling works and excerpts from antiquity until today. A commonplace book of sorts.
from Books vs Goons (Salman Rushdie)
Mostly we read books and set them aside, or hurl them from us with great force, and pass on. Yet sometimes there is a small residue that has an effect. The reason for this is the always unexpected and unpredictable intervention of that rare and sneaky phenomenon, love. One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one’s guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
—Salman Rushdie
—from “Books vs. Goons”
—found in the Los Angeles Times (April 24, 2005)
Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire.
—Slavoj Žižek
—found in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006 documentary by Sophie Fiennes)
from Pandemonium (Lauren Oliver)
But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.
—Lauren Oliver
—found in Pandemonium (2012)
from West with the Night (Beryl Markham)
I suppose, if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.
—Beryl Markham
—found in West with the Night (1942)
from Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott)
…the garden did not start out as metaphor. It started out as paradise. Then, as now, the garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things. The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe. It’s part of an urgent territorial drive that we can probably trace back to animals storing food. It’s a competitive display mechanism, like having a prize bull, this greed for the best tomatoes and English tea roses; it’s about winning, about providing society with superior things, and about proving that you have taste and good values and you work hard. And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is—because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph—and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it.
—Anne Lamott
—found in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)
from The Last Man (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
It is a strange fact, but incontestible, that the philanthropist, who ardent in his desire to do good, who patient, reasonable and gentle, yet disdains to use other argument than truth, has less influence over men’s minds, than he who, grasping and selfish, refuses not to adopt any means, nor awaken any passion, nor diffuse any falsehood, for the advancement of his cause.
—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
—found in The Last Man (1826)
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