The Art of Tetman Callis

“French logic is very simple. Whatever the French do is logical because the French are doing it.” – James Baldwin, Another Country Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of […]

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“Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.” – James Baldwin, Another Country Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived—nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died—through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in […]

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“The white South said that it knew ‘niggers,’ and I was what the white South called a ‘nigger.’ Well, the white South had never known me—never known what I thought, what I felt. The white South said that I had a ‘place’ in life. Well. I had never felt any ‘place’; or, rather, my deepest […]

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“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books; consequently, my belief in books had risen more out of a sense of desperation than from any abiding conviction of their ultimate value. . . . It had been my accidental reading of fiction and literary criticism that had evoked […]

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“If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions; but to ferret out those who no longer respond to the system in which they live. I would make […]

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“Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs […]

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“Among the topics that southern white men did not like to discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; Frenchwomen; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U. S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the […]

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“As long as there’s suffering, you can only be so happy. How can a person be happy if he has misfortune? Does money make a person happy? Some wealthy billionaire who can buy 30 cars and maybe buy a sports team, is that guy happy? What then would make him happier? Does it make him […]

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“Mama says she named me by flipping open her English textbook to a random page and pointing. Angela, it said, like an angel. I know this story is fake, because if it were real, my name would be something like Fish or Lawyer.” – Angie Sijun Lou, All We Ask Is You to be Happy […]

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“There is no known historical period when the Sahara has not been inhabited by man. Most of the other larger forms of animal life, whose abode it formerly was, have become extinct. If we believe the evidence of cave drawings, we can be sure that the giraffe, the hippopotamus and the rhinoceros were once dwellers […]

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“Security is a false god; begin making sacrifices to it and you are lost.” – Paul Bowles, “Notes Mailed at Nagercoil” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“My father passed away and this is what I found myself remembering—not the things that were, but the things that were not: the places not visited, the words not said, the stories not shared.” – Olga Grushin, “Portrait of My Father” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“No one can hurt you the way a mother can. No one can love you the way a mother can.” – Kira Madden, “The Greeter” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“What ultimately lets us move on is not acceptance but boredom.” – Mary South, “The Promised Hostel” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“If life is occasionally interesting in anecdote, it’s not in the actual living.” – Mary South, “Architecture for Monsters” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“In order to be, one must not only be to one’s self: it is absolutely imperative that one be for others. One must have a way of basing one’s being on the certainty that others know one is there.” – Paul Bowles, “If I Should Open My Mouth” (emphasis in original) Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“Why were machines ever invented? And what is this strange calm confidence that mankind has placed in these senseless toys it has managed to put together?” – Paul Bowles, “If I Should Open My Mouth” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“The Keiths are Keiths because they are not particularly handsome, not particularly intelligent, not particularly kind. A Keith would never train to compete in professional sports or practice an instrument until he became a maestro. Neither would a Keith jump in front of a loaded gun, but he would help you gather the contents of […]

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“Material prosperity is necessary as a foundation for the highest intellectual effort.” – John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“The short story is the most purely artistic form; it expresses the ultimate meaning of all artistic creation as mood, as the very sense and content of the creative process, but it is rendered abstract for that very reason. It sees absurdity in all its undisguised and unadorned nakedness, and the exorcising power of this […]

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“What is meaningless and tragic in the world has not grown larger since the beginning of time; it is only that the songs of comfort ring out more loudly or are more muffled.” – Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock) Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“Religion operates in different ways in different persons. It hardens some natures to pride and bigotry; it softens others to sentimentality and a refusal to confront life’s sterner demands. Some it inexplicably irradiates; some it brutalizes. Religion may be as Professor Freud said, civilization’s greatest illusion. If that is so, it may be thought of […]

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“Fools admire everything in an author of reputation.” – Voltaire, Candide (trans. The Modern Library) Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“My innocence would not have saved me if I had not been good-looking.” – Voltaire, Candide (trans. The Modern Library) Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“The desire to order does not live far from the urge to destroy.” – Ben Ehrenreich, “When Animals Conspire” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“With love one can live even without happiness.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground (trans. unknown) Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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“The writer has lost a great deal of his influence, and he is situated now, if anywhere, on the margins of the culture. But isn’t this where he belongs? How could it be any other way? And in my personal view this is a perfect place to observe what’s happening at the dead center of […]

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“It doesn’t cost a fortune to murder people, nor does it take much time. It’s concealing the crime that’s difficult, even if you’re smart and have a system.” – Rosaleen Bertolino, “The Monster’s Wife” Share this…FacebookPinterestTwitterLinkedinemailPrint

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