The Art of Tetman Callis

“If the reader is not at risk, he is not reading. And if the writer is not at risk, he is not writing. As a rule, a writer and a book or a poem are no good if the writer is essentially unchanged morally after having written it. If the work is really a holding […]

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“In Europe, reading is known to be dangerous. Reading always leads to personal metamorphosis, sometimes irreversible, sometimes temporary, sometimes large-scale, sometimes less than that. A good book leads to alterations in one’s sensibility and often becomes a premise in one’s beliefs. One associates truth with texts, with impressive texts anyway; and when trashy books vanish […]

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“When the factories began to replace cottage industries, the parents became collectivized in the new institution, and so it was thought only natural that the children should be too. But the younger members of the human species did not take to industrialization so readily; the factory literally became a Procrustean bed, and as the children […]

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“The role of an educational bureaucracy is to educate people to bureaucracy, and this can be done as well in a course in humanities as in one in business administration. If one controls the structure, one can afford to allow a liberal amount of play in the content.” – William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth

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“History isn’t a stage; it’s the air we breathe. It enables us, and traps us.” – Adam Shatz, “Jazz and the Images that Hold Us Captive”

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“Nothing pulls the art world into line faster than the sight of an imperial checkbook.” – Robert Hughes, “The Rise of Andy Warhol”

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“Myth is not an early level of human development, but an imaginative description of reality in which the known is related to the unknown through a system of correspondences in which mind and matter, self, society, and cosmos are integrally expressed in an esoteric language of poetry and number which is itself a performance of […]

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“All the computers in the world won’t help you if your unexamined and unconscious assumptions on the nature of reality are simply wrong in their basic conception.” – William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History

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“The difficulty with the liberal imagination is that it is so owned by the myth of progress that it cannot think of the future in any other terms except more of the same.” – William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History

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“By giving up the hope and the risk of achieving anything of true value, the bureaucrat protects himself and thus ensures his failure.” – William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History

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“Rationality was possible in Greek, Roman, and European civilizations because there were only a few hundred books one needed to know. We have now reached the point where even an academic who devotes his whole life to reading cannot possibly keep up, even with his own limited field.” – William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge […]

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“The Great Goddess had several faces: she was huge and called us from her womb, she was beautiful and called us to her bed, and she was ugly and called us to death.” – William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History

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“At the moments when we are at a turning point, we are permitted to look out across all the curves of the road to see the end hanging down almost within our grasp; but when we come to the top of the first incline, we find that the road cuts back and we can only […]

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“There are only two choices open to those who have discovered that society is a madhouse. In the tradition of Plato’s cave, they can withdraw and seek light elsewhere to discover the larger landscape in which the madhouse is located. Or, if that Platonic tradition of the Good seems merely an infantile fantasy, they can […]

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“In the literary sphere we grapple with one mind at a time; in the digital sphere there is always a mass of other minds. If all forms of reading might be imagined as variations on the simple act of driving down a road, then reading a novel might be like driving down a lonely, very […]

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“Ask yourself sincerely at odd moments, ‘Am I prone to deep feeling?’ for it is less than necessary—that very small, bright, enlarging thing. The passions do not knock one out, but they may permit you to have carnal complaints before proceeding further.” – Diane Williams, “Woman in Rose Dress”

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“There is a great difference between love, hatred, and desire, but nothing compels us to maintain these differences.” – Diane Williams, “Mood Which Gripped Me”

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“The customer entered his home, approached his wife, and considered his chances. Hadn’t his wife been daily smacked across the mouth with lipstick and cut above the eyes with mascara?” – Diane Williams, “On the Job”

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“Do you know how the animals got their tails? How the lesser gods came into the world? The longer this goddess lives, the more she shakes her tail—or pulls on it with all her strength.” – Diane Williams, “How Blown Up”

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“The person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last.” – John Williams, Stoner

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“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have […]

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“Memory is an arsonist, setting fires cell-deep at ungovernable intervals of time and space. Lights go on, searching out pain. The hands of another. The mother voice, singing to block out the noise. Titanic laughter and with it confusion. Clouds, white, grey striations, disposed across the eye. The folded heron in the reed bed, the […]

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“If you don’t look out the window, you forget what is worth seeing. A person could get used to anything.” – Michael J. Seidlinger, “Every Time You’re Alone: An Incomplete List”

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“All the hours, all the days, the months in figurative seclusion, all the sentences written that’ll never be read, and all the books published that’ll never reach any more than a handful. And yet it’s still in the act of solitude that I look to make a connection, to be something other than alone. There’s […]

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“Every plot has room for an assassin or two.” – Deb Olin Unferth, “Your Character”

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“In seeking to survive and yet to retain the authenticity existing at parturition one will either be killed or go mad, if not one will constantly be on the run.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)

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“To be boundless to the point of forgetting one’s existence cannot be acquired.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)

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“Not having a goal is a goal, the act of searching itself turns into a sort of goal, and the object of the search is irrelevant.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)

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“Philosophy in the end is an intellectual game. At limits unattainable by mathematics and the empirical sciences, it constructs all sorts of intricate structures. And as a structure is completed, the game ends. Fiction is different from philosophy because it is the product of sensory perceptions. If a futile self-made signifier is saturated in a […]

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“The road stretches endlessly and there is always a point where the sky and earth meet, but the road just crawls over it.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)

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