“Mitch Hedberg, dead of an overdose at thirty-seven, said of addiction that it is a disease, but a weird one: ‘It’s the only disease people yell at you for having’.” – Justin E. H. Smith, “A Surfeit of Black Bile”
Category: Lit & Crit
“We say different things for different audiences, whether in intimate dialogue with a loved one, or displayed as a curiosity like the eloquent ape in Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’. This means that at least to some extent all life is a ‘performance’, which we do not have to interpret in any radical way, such as you might have encountered in a graduate seminar in ‘Performance Studies’ at NYU circa 1996. We only need to acknowledge that our encounters in everyday life are not just a matter of showing up, of hauling our body out of domestic storage; these encounters are also a ‘presentation of the self’, which requires at a minimum that a person make choices about how the self is presented, in what light, which angles to showcase, to what ends. It may be that one partially adequate gloss on what it is to be mentally healthy is that this is a state in which the performative quality of quotidian self-presentations retreats into the background, and a person feels as if the self who is coming across to others is naturally and spontaneously the real one (more or less). I can only guess at what that might be like.” – Justin E. H. Smith, “A Surfeit of Black Bile”
“An elderly man was at home, dying in bed. He smelled the aroma of his favorite chocolate chip cookies baking. He wanted one last cookie before he died. He fell out of bed, crawled to the landing, rolled down the stairs, and crawled into the kitchen where his wife was busily baking cookies. With waning strength he crawled to the table and was just barely able to lift his withered arm to the cookie sheet. As he grasped a warm, moist, chocolate chip cookie, his favorite kind, his wife suddenly whacked his hand with a spatula. ‘Why?’ he whispered. ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘They’re for the funeral,’ she said.” – Mady Schutzman, “Being Approximate: The Ganser Syndrome and Beyond”
“Verbal nonsense (Ganser syndrome) and physical nonsense (buffoonery syndrome) within the realm of medical science are pathologized conditions. Verbal nonsense (as in vaudeville, joking) and physical nonsense (as in slapstick, clowning) within the realm of entertainment (both on and off the stage) are conditions of art.” – Mady Schutzman, “Being Approximate: The Ganser Syndrome and Beyond”
“The more one has experienced, the more there is to be astonished by. Our capacity for wonder grows with experience, becomes more urgent.” – Elias Canetti, “Selected Notes from Hampstead” (trans. John Hargraves)
“Don’t say it’s too late: how can you know you don’t still have thirty years to begin a new life? Don’t say it’s too early: how can you know that you won’t be dead in a month and that other people won’t fashion lives for themselves out of the ruins of yours?” – Elias Canetti, “Selected Notes from Hampstead” (trans. John Hargraves)
“Adhesives: The promises you promise not to break. The forgiveness when you do.” – Beth Kephart, “Love in the Knots of the Coptic Stitch”
“There is only one unpardonable sin—deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never.” – Truman Capote, The Thanksgiving Visitor (emphasis in original)
“It’s the freaking American way—you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous craphole. And finally maybe you get a mansion.” – George Saunders, “Sea Oak”
“I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled her off to a sanitarium. I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly that they take you away from the known world for wanting it?” – Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch”
“It is worth attention, that the English have more songs and ballads on the subject of madness, than any of their neighbours.” – Bishop Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
“Life turned out to be a string of small disasters twisted together with a bunch of thankless work. So many things. It was hard to even catch your breath.” – Mary Jones, “A Longer and Slightly More Complicated History of Her Heart”
“The man that will not when he may, sall have nocht when he wald.” – Robert Henryson, “Robin and Makyne”
“There’s nobody less salvageable than a ruined good boy.” – Philip Roth, Nemesis
“Sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you’re not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance—the tyranny of contingency—is everything.” – Philip Roth, Nemesis
“I am no such pil’d cynique to believe that beggery is the onely happinesse, or, with a number of these patient fooles, to sing, ‘My minde to me a kingdoms is,’ when the lanke hungrie belly barkes for foode.” – Ben Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour
“The less fear the better. Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us.” – Philip Roth, Nemesis
“The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short.” – Stephen King, The Stand
“But if there be no great philosophic idea, if, for the time being, mankind, instead of going through a period of growth, is going through a corresponding process of decay and decomposition from some old, fulfilled, obsolete idea, then what is the good of educating? Decay and decomposition will take their own way. It is impossible to educate for this end, impossible to teach the world how to die away from its achieved, nullified form. The autumn must take place in every individual soul, as well as in all the people, all must die, individually and socially. But education is a process of striving to a new, unanimous being, a whole organic form. But when winter has set in, when the frosts are strangling the leaves off the trees and the birds are silent knots of darkness, how can there be a unanimous movement towards a whole summer of fluorescence? There can be none of this, only submission to the death of this nature, in the winter that has come upon mankind, and a cherishing of the unknown that is unknown for many a day yet, buds that may not open till a far off season comes, when the season of death has passed away.” – D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
“Modernity has not turned out altogether well. To the pioneers of Enlightenment, it appeared that false certainties and artificial hierarchies were the chief obstacles to general happiness. To many the suspicion has by now occurred that there are no true certainties and no natural hierarchies, yet also that individual and social well-being require some certainties, some hierarchies. The rapid increase in mobility and choice, in sheer volume of stimuli that followed the erosion of traditional ways of life and thought has taxed, and occasionally overwhelmed, nearly every modern man or woman. This no longer seems, even to the most optimistic partisans of modernity, merely a phenomenon of transition. It may be that just as in any generation there are broad limits to physical and intellectual development, so also there are psychological limits, which likewise alter slowly. ‘Human nature,’ in short, though in an empirical rather than a metaphysical sense; not eternal and immutable, but with enough continuity – inertia, to be precise – to generate illusions of essence and a need for roots.” – George Scialabba, “Demos and Sophia: Not a Love Story”
“None of us want to see portents and omens, no matter how much we like our ghost stories and the spooky films. None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine.” – Stephen King, The Stand (emphasis in original)
“The culture of professionalism and expertise, the bureaucratization of opinion and taste, are not merely mechanisms of social control or a failure of nerve. They are also in part a response to genuine intellectual progress. There’s more to know now than in the ‘30s, and more people have joined the conversation. Perhaps the disappearance of the public intellectual and the eclipse of the classical ideals of wisdom as catholicity of understanding and of citizenship as the capacity to discuss all public affairs are evidences of cultural maturity. Intellectual wholeness is an almost irresistibly attractive ideal; but nowadays too determined a pursuit of it must end in fragmentation and superficiality.” – George Scialabba, “The Sealed Envelope”
“The beginning of political decency and rationality is to recognize others’ similarity in important respects to oneself; that is, to identify imaginatively. Which is what one does when reading fiction. Literature is, in this sense, practice for civic life.” – George Scialabba, “The Sealed Envelope”
“Time past was time past. You just couldn’t get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.” – Stephen King, The Stand
“Thought is the enemy of flow.” – Vinnie Colaiuta (quoted by Rick Beato in “Why Jeff Beck is Uncopyable”)
“If you can’t afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can’t afford the zoo, go see a politician.” – Stephen King, The Stand
“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance . . . or change. Once such incantatory phrases as ‘we see now through a glass darkly’ and ‘mysterious are the ways He chooses His wonders to perform’ are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window. Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world’s vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it’s all on purpose.” – Stephen King, The Stand (emphasis in original)
“Not ‘Forgive us our sins’ but ‘Smite us for our iniquities’ should be the prayer of man to a most just God.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray