The Art of Tetman Callis

“We can see our souls in the contents of our baggage. Pack too much and we risk being weighed down by the place we’re trying to leave. Pack too little and we risk losing ourselves.” — Stefany Anne Goldberg, “You Can Take It with You” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Because why the hell not… Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.” — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy […]

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“Silence is not nothing, it’s something.” – Michel Hazanavicius (quoted by Tad Friend in “Sound of Silence”) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The dream of being a writer and the crazy price one has to pay for excellence are impossible to demonstrate or, really, even to fathom.” – John Lahr, “A Talent to Abuse” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Don’t ever forget that you’re a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day.” – Aaron Sorkin, Syracuse University commencement speech, 2012. Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.” – Peter Thiel (quoted by George Packer in “No Death, No Taxes”) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Whereas instruction doesn’t always delight, delight always instructs.” — Martin Amis, “Laureate of Terror” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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It’s three hundred million guns loaded now… Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“When you cut the heads off your rich folks, you end up with a lot of unemployed chefs.” – Marc Meltonville (quoted by Lauren Collins in “The King’s Meal”) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn’t understand us, and we don’t understand him.” – José Saramago, Cain (trans. Costa) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“A wrong note that is played out of élan, you hear it differently than one that is played out of fear.” – Hélène Grimaud (quoted by D. T. Max in “Her Way”) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Without stories, memory falters; and without memory imagination fails.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “Faces in Time” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“That spirit of performativity you have about your citizenship now? That sense that someone’s peering over your shoulder, watching everything you do and say and think and choose? That feeling of being observed? It’s not a new facet of life in the 21st century. It’s what it feels like for a girl.” — Rahel Aima, […]

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“In the world of women’s work, how one looks is as important, if not more important, than what one does: The existential anxiety of identity creation is also economic and social anxiety, because the penalties for nonconformity are so high. Feminine mystique becomes identity itself. The woman who does not possess it, the ugly woman, […]

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“When beauty becomes mandatory, it ceases to be about fun, about play. Dressing up, playing with gender roles, doing your braids badly in the mirror, and eating half your mother’s lipstick in an attempt to get it on your face: Do you remember when that used to be fun? And do you remember when it […]

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There’s this: Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“More than love, sex, courtship, and marriage; more than inheritance, ambition, rivalry, or disgrace; more than hatred, betrayal, revenge, or death, orphanhood—the absence of the parent, the frightening yet galvanizing solitude of the child—may be the defining fixation of the novel as a genre, what one might call its primordial motive or matrix, the conditioning […]

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“Learning isn’t a set of things that we know but a world that we enter.” — Adam Gopnik, “Broken Kingdom” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Maybe I can describe it this way.  I like to play chess.  I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers.  I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted.  And he beat me nine or ten games in a row.  That’s […]

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“To take a physical object out of someone’s possession is clearly not equivalent to making a copy for oneself while leaving all other copies untouched. If the right of physical property grants the right to control a particular copy of an object — a particular pair of Nike shoes, for example — the right of […]

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“Beneath its frontier rhetoric of individualism and autonomy, capitalism is founded on the exercise of state power to defend the institution of private property. Its model of generalized commodity exchange presupposes a novel world in which everything is parceled into discrete chunks and tagged with the name of its owner. This way of seeing things […]

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“It takes more than full bellies to make fulfilled lives.  Without enough to eat, life is nasty; with merely enough to eat, it feels empty.  The escape from not-enough can highlight the emptiness of only-enough.” – Adam Gopnik, “Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“War is cruelty.  There is no use trying to reform it.  The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” – William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863 (quoted in The Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby Foote) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.” — Louis Menand, “Browbeaten” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Remember what Socrates tells Euthyphro, who supposed that the good could be defined by what the gods had willed: if what the gods will is based on some other criterion of goodness, divine will isn’t what makes something good; but if goodness is simply determined by divine will there’s no way for us to assess […]

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“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.”—Mario Andretti Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“I would banish all minor questions, assert the broad doctrine that as a nation the United States has the right, and also the physical power, to penetrate to every part of our national domain, and that we will do it—that we will do it in our own time and in our own way; that it […]

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“Editing has pushed me to recognize when my own work is not succeeding and how essential revision is to the process. It’s also taught me that belief in a piece is essential to publication. Editing inspires, perhaps even demands, belief in a poem or story, enough to publish work that’s operating at its best quality.  […]

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“Cats and birds are wonderful, but they keep their own counsel and their own identity.  They sit withing their own circles, even in the house, and let us spy, occasionally, on what it’s like out there.  Only the dog sits right at the edge of the first circle of caring, and points to the great […]

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