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

Not a people person...

“Normal human beings are a balm to me, and a torment at the same time.”

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in “Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein,” letter 23 from 16.11.19, compiled by Paul Engelmann

“They are not human at all, but loathsome worms.”

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, writing of the people of the small town of  Hassbach in same book, letter 48 from 14.9.22

You are what you read...

"This is not to say, however, that the significance of all his remarks was always transparently clear; perhaps the most gnomic was his comment on Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe's husband. When Mrs Bevan asked Wittgenstein what Geach was like, he replied solemnly: 'He reads Somerset Maugham.'"

--Ray Monk, "Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius," pg. 577

Wittgenstein's fear

"The Oxford philosopher, John Mabbott, recalls that when he arrived in Nottingham to attend the conference he met at the student hostel a youngish man with a rucksack, shorts and open-neck shirt. Never having seen Wittgenstein before, he assumed that this was a student on vacation who did not know his hostel had been given over to those attending the conference. 'I'm afraid there is a gathering of philosophers going on in here', he said kindly. Wittgenstein replied darkly: 'I too.'"

-Ray Monk, "Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius," pg.275

Taunting Wittgenstein

"They [fellow grade school students] ridiculed him by chanting an alliterative jingle that made play of his unhappiness and of the distance between him and the rest of the school: 'Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts.' ('Wittgenstein wends his woeful windy way towards Vienna'). In his efforts to make friends, he felt, he later said, 'betrayed and sold' by his schoolmates."

-Ray Monk, "Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius," pg. 16

Cosmic visceral humming vs. world of bees...

"Later that night with Rosalie asleep from despair, he presumed, he went back into the tiny kitchen more windowless than ever and plastered his ear to the wall. No distinct sound, only a cosmic visceral humming, greater, far greater than the ploy of mere neighbors, as if the world were bees and nothing but. Overhead there was a brief, almost apologetic, scraping of what sounded like chair against tiled floor. He shrugged this away as beneath the contempt of his vigilance. Beyond this scraping there was no message, as from a beyond, on how to go about proving the yet-to-be fabled potency of his vocation was more than a hyposecretion of sebaceous glands. Of course the scraping of chair could mean: You have to think of more than yourself, there’s Rosalie and the child in her belly. But the scraping could also mean: Don’t bother demeaning yourself through exertion."

-Michael Brodsky, XMAN, pg 131