The Art of Tetman Callis

“Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What […]

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“Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning […]

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“The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which […]

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“The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an […]

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“The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of […]

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“Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they’d heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some […]

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“The architects that preceded us in ceaseless labor, life after life, built on the inherited acropolis of law a constitutional structure ever-changing, ever enduring, unfinished, in parts neglected and decaying, obdurate yet imagined. Their legacy resides in the methods by which, case by case, generation by generation, the barriers of law channel the tumults of […]

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“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don’t want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for […]

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“No two mornings are ever quite the same. Some are cold and dark and rainy, and some—a great many, in fact—are like the beginning of the world. First the idea of morning comes, and then, though it is still utterly dark and you can’t see your hand in front of your face, a rooster crows, […]

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“A woman who has no secrets from her husband is not a woman but a child.” – William Maxwell, “The pessimistic fortune-teller” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“Big Brother, it turns out, is a capitalist who wants to sell you blue jeans.” – “The everywhere stores,” The Economist, October 28th, 2017 Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“Characters in fiction are seldom made out of whole cloth. A little of this person and something of that one and whatever else the novelist’s imagination suggests is how they come into being. The novelist hopes that by avoiding actual appearances and actual names (which are so much more convincing than the names he invents […]

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“The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other […]

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“There are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.” – Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“It is necessary to set myself out of motion, to disremember the automatic commands I have followed for so long, so many years of willfulness and waste. No more deconstruction or synopsis. Only pure unbroken signal. I open wide and it comes in so loud and clear that I twinge all up and down.” – […]

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“You could enter into people only so far and then had to come out the same way. There was never a way clear through. You were always back to where you started.” – Gary Lutz, “I Have to Feel Halved” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“It is said, isn’t it, that you ‘make’ love because it’s otherwise not really there?” – Gary Lutz, “I Have to Feel Halved” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“Their mother had taught them that you can ask anybody anything, but it can’t always be, ‘Do I know you?’ That you had arms to bar yourself from people. That you had to watch what you touched after you had already gone ahead and touched some other thing first. That the most pestering thing on […]

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“It’s so silly, and really it’s my own stupid fault. Ed’ll kill me, not for the money but like they say for the principle. You know. He thinks I’m a terrible slob that way, he’s a great one for believing in foreseeable actions. I lost the Buick last year, and the year before that I […]

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“The public interest in preserving the sanctity of the family is a significant public interest.” — Judge Stephan C. Hansbury, Superior Court of New Jersey, in K.A. and K.I.A v. J.L. Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“Memory can be the wind on someone’s back. It rides there for a moment before fleeing into a field of oblivion.” – Vi Khi Nao, “It’s a Fish Sitting on My Face” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“That baby should follow baby is God’s trick on us, but surely we too can have a trick on God? If we fabricate with our syllables an immortality passed from the spines of the old to the shoulders of the young, even God cannot spite it. If the prayer-load that spilled upward from the mass […]

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“A house is not a home. It’s just an unflattering brick-and-shingle apparatus for seeing to it that people get bulked into belittling intimacy on the unlofty proppage of furniture.” – Gary Lutz, “A Woman with No Middle Name” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“I spent a great deal of time on my knees. If you didn’t go along, there were 25 girls who would.” – Marilyn Monroe (quoted in “An Open Secret,” The Economist, October 21st, 2017) Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“I had no idea that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The cast of larger-than-life characters—affectionate aunts, friends of the family, neighbors white and black—that I was presented with when I came into the world. The […]

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“America’s good at plumbing.” – Cynthia Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxy Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“If I avoid metaphor, and if I have to think of a reason why, it may be that I don’t want to distract from the one thing that I’m concentrating on, and a metaphor immediately does that. It introduces some completely, even incongruous, other image and world. And it can work very beautifully, but maybe […]

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“We judge a myth by its practical influences, and are obliged to ask it practical questions: What do you intend? Who should respect you? What will you cause? What do you disclose about envy, cruelty, lust, hope, growth, power, choice, faith, pity? Whose mouth should receive you?” – Cynthia Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxy Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“After the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke up, it reassembled in Cleveland.” – Edward McClelland, How to Speak Midwestern Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.” – Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (trans. Ted […]

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