Preach.

– “Bad Machinery: The Case of the Lonely One” by John Allison, pg. 110

If power were horses...

   Stupid things they say: “If it were in my power, I would never permit this or that.”
   It's possible, if the power was given to you now, miraculously. But if you'd grown up enclosed in your power, slave of your power, you'd be on the side of the ones who do the beating.

— Diary of Andrés Fava, by Julio Cortázar, pg. 46

Critical reading

One afternoon I was reading The Brothers Karamazov, and idly wondering which brother I'd like to fuck, Dimitri or Ivan, when the phone rang.

— Conversations with Stalin, by Elanor Antin, pg. 111

Motto

And if we live, we live to tread on kings.

— Henry IV, Part I by Shakespeare

Our charge:

Can a civilization that evolves more and more around market activity, more and more around the buying and selling of commodities, expand the scope of freedom and democracy? Can we simply bear witness to its slow decay and doom–a painful denouement prefigured already in many poor black and brown communities and rapidly embracing all of us? These haunting questions remain unanswered yet the challenge they pose must not remain unmet. The new cultural politics of difference tries to confront these enormous and urgent challenges. It will require all the imagination, intelligence, courage, sacrifice, care and laughter we can muster.

– Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America by Cornel West, pg. 31

Showing, not telling...

   This time, as a token of his master's love, the messenger brought a handful of earth and a handful of salt, an ancient Bactrian custom that was observed persisting as late as the seventeenth century, according to the accounts of Tavernier and Chardin. But Arsaphes, driven by the obduracy of the princess and feeling victory within his grasp, added to the traditional offering two partridge eggs, one painted blue and the other red. The princess easily saw their significance, mysterious as it may seem to us. The colored eggs meant that though women may not look exactly alike, in the end they taste alike.
   Princess Heloise was worthy of the captain's admiration. She knew how to answer insolence. She sent back the lieutenant with two flasks which looked as though they contained water, but when Arsaphes tasted them, he found that while the first was indeed full of water, the second held the strongest and headiest rye brandy he had ever drunk. He then realized that while people may no doubt look alike, some are insipid and dull while others burn and intoxicate.

— The Glory of the Empire, by Jean D'Ormesson, pg. 25

The other problem...

The other problem with [Rikki Tikki Tavi]—not that there are any real problems with the story, it's a good story...—but it's sad to think of such a likable mongoose eating holes in the baby cobra eggs. The baby cobras hadn't killed anything or frightened anyone. They would when they hatched out, because that's what cobra snakes are designed to do naturally. But a story should not have a small, tiny, curled-up barely alive animal be killed unless it has done a terrible thing, which it can't have done because it hasn't even uncurled itself from the egg. And the story isn't about what cobras do naturally, anyway, since it has cobras speaking. In real life they don't speak, at least in English. A cobra couldn't call itself 'Nag' or 'Nagaina' because the cobra's tongue is so thin it couldn't make an N sound. A cobra would probably call itself 'Lah,' if anything.

—The Everlasting Story of Nory, by Nicholson Baker, pg. 36

Two for the price of one...

   “And if any such thing should occur, understand that I would hold all three of you equally guilty and would mete out my vengeance accordingly. She, he, and you.”

   “We would be four, madam. A man who has been warned is worth two ordinary men.”
—The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, by Maurice Dekobra, pg. 95

By Crom!

“A phrase of his father's returned to him: you give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life. (“Remember that, Joseph,”—with one hand on Pritchard's shoulder, and the other clasping a newborn puppy against his chest; the next day Pritchard dubbed the young thing Cromwell, and his father nodded once.)”

—The Luminaries, by Elenor Catton, pg. 165

Just because you can bring up Matthew Arnold doesn't mean you should

“...finally, it is said, he died by leaping into the crater of Etna to prove that he was a god. In the words of the [unknown] poet:

    'Great Empedocles, that ardent soul
    Lept into Etna, and was roasted whole.'

Matthew Arnold wrote a poem on this subject, but, although one of his worst, it does not contain the above couplet.”

— “The History of Western Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell, pg. 53

The more things change...

“The TRUMP movement (not party) is the strongest by far. Why? Because it takes advantage of the weakness of “those who blindly desire something different” using a revolutionary, amorphous mass of men who are both non-conscientious and irresponsible. On the other side, it takes advantage of the fear and greed of the grand bourgeoisie and turns that amorphous mass into armed bands against DEMOCRATS. It attracts all those who feel the weight of the OBAMA regime without being able to count upon themselves to transform it. It gives the illusion of force through violence; it gives the illusion of order through defending the family, private property and religion; it gives the illusion of protection with its promise of dignified comfort for all. Its fundamental character is inconsistency. Since it is the “reflection of the very inconsistency of the REPUBLICAN PARTY in their present circumstances,” its language is understandable to all those desperate men who flock to TRUMP: PUNDITS, the petite bourgeoisie of the city and country, almost all farm laborers, the majority of the unemployed in the cities, among whom are many adolescents. To the romantic young it offers the mirage of noble deeds, to the brutish the implied promise of beatings and killings. It promises high prices to the farmer, low prices to the consumer. In its substance, it is a nationalist fanaticism rooted in a feeling which the AMERICANS have experienced, whether they are right or wrong: the certainty that the capitalism of the victorious DEMOCRATS is crushing them much worse than REPUBLICAN capitalism.”

—paraphrase of Simone Weil's observations of 1932 Germany, with a few words updated for 2016, quoted from “Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography” by Gabriella Fiori

Inside an argument

“I was correcting her about my books: they did not have walls, they had holes dug deep in the earth.”

— Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge by Renee Gladman

The upside of crazy ideas...

“It was not at all unusual in theoretical physics to spend a lot of time on a speculative notion that turns out to be wrong. I do it all the time. Having a lot of crazy ideas is the secret to my success. Some of them turned out to be right!”
—Interactions by Sheldon Glashow, pg. 114

Terror, full agony of

I was alarmed by so formidable a social occasion, but less alarmed than I had been a few months earlier when I was left tête-à-tête with Mr. Gladstone. ... As I was the only male in the household, he and I were left alone together at the dinner table after the ladies retired. He made only one remark: “This is a very good port they have given me, but why have they given me it in a claret glass?” I did not know the answer and wished the earth would swallow me up. Since then I have never again felt the full agony of terror.

— Autobiography, Vol. 1 by Bertrand Russell

Uncomfortable conversation...

—Jason, "If You Steal," pg. ?

An alternative to raking leaves...

“We have sometimes wondered where the idea came from to powder the leaves with snake essence, but after some fruitless speculation we have eventually concluded that the origin of customs, especially when they are useful and successful, is lost in the mists of time. One fine day the city must have realized that its population was inadequate for the collection of each year's leaf fall and that only the intelligent utilization of the mongooses, which abound in the country, could overcome this deficiency. Some functionary from the town bordering the forests must have noticed that the mongooses, completely indifferent to dead leaves, would become ravenous for them if they smelled of snake. It must have taken a long time to reach this conclusion, to study the reaction of the mongooses to the dead leaves, to powder the leaves so that the mongooses would go after them with a vengeance.”


—“Around the Day in Eighty Worlds” by Julio Cortázar,  pg. 77

Cortázar does Fluxus...

   “THE SIMPLEST WAY TO DESTROY A CITY
   Hidden in the grass, wait for a large cumulus cloud to drift over the hated city. Then shoot a petrifying arrow; the cloud will turn to stone and the consequences go without saying.”

— “Around the Day in Eighty Worlds” by Julio Cortázar, pg. 7

Why paintings are different...

“And then why La Tour, who painted the same painting twice, had him hiding an Ace of Diamonds in the Louvre, and an Ace of Clubs in the Kimbell Museum. That's correct, isn't it Pierre? I'm not mistaken?”

I joined in his game. One always had to sniff out the humour in my uncle's words.

“But, Uncle Charles, it's so that the museum curators can tell which is which.”

—Philippe Beaussant, “Rendezvous In Venice,” pg. 64

Butt of the joke...

“And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump."

—Michel Montaigne, quoted in Sarah Bakewell's “How to Live,” pg. 148

Sad woman...

“She tries harder, this twenty-eight-year-old woman, to remember what it is to be happy, and with alarm she realizes she no longer knows, that it's like a foreign language she learned in childhood but has now forgotten, remembering only that she knew it once. When was the last time I was happy?”

—“The Post-Office Girl” by Stefan Zweig,  pg. 19