“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 as resembling a sun long extinct whose rays still continue to warm, animate, and inspirit the minds of men. It instilled fear and awe in the cave-dwellers; it offered the image of an overwatching Eye; it became identified with all those dawning ideas of order and morality, of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ of rewards and penalties. For thousands of years it has played a large part in the public and private life of mankind. Truth or illusion, it is ingrained in the human mind. There are two characteristics of men and women of religious conviction that have often been remarked. The first is their way of viewing the facts of the daily life—our humble daily life —as freighted with the greatest importance, particularly in relation to the future. Everything is under that overwatching Eye; everything is on a Grand Scale. Such men and women are seldom able to transmit to their children the conviction that illuminates them, but in that charged cell, which is family life —in that enclosed space of finely tuned acoustics—they transmit the concept of scale. Their children learn to think big, to make large demands on life, on themselves, and on others. This ‘scale’ has not necessarily any spiritual qualifications; it’s enough that it’s big, big. Hence the phrase ‘Beware of sharks and missionaries’ children.’ ” – Thornton Wilder, “New Haven, 1920” (emphasis in original)
Category: Verandah
“Listen up: Find a nice girl from the neighborhood, treat her with respect, buy her flowers from time to time and you’ll be happy all your days.” – John Kass, Chicago Tribune, August 10, 2018
“Dance if the streets are full. Dance harder when the streets are empty.” – Kelli Colyer-Christian, Facebook, May 22, 2020
“Some people travel abroad to find themselves. I’m not one of them.” – Adriana Paramo, “He Tells Me That I’m Beautifool”
“Let us preserve our reputation by performing our engagements; our credit by fulfilling our contracts; and friends by gratitude and kindness; for we know not how soon we may again have occasion for all of them.” – Benjamin Franklin, “Letter to Samuel Mather”, May 12, 1784
“No one is safe. The world is corrupt. All we can do is dance. “ – Tammy Heejae Lee, “Roe Soup Dance”
“The noblest question in the world is What Good may I do in it?” – Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard, 1737 (emphasis in original)
“What is true, what is false, is but wind in a horse’s ear.” – Takuan Soho, Painting of the Master of Mount Yu Riding a Donkey (trans. Stephen D. Allee)
“Fujiwara Sadanobu (1088-1156) was the grandson of Fujiwara Yukinari (Kozei, 972-1027), one of the greatest calligraphers of Japan, and the son of Sadazane (1063-ca. 1131) . . .. He is known for having copied single-handedly onto nearly six hundred scrolls the entire Issaikyo, the Chinese translation of the Tripitaka, a task that spanned twenty-seven years. His efforts literally went up in smoke a few years later, when the temple to which he had donated the work, a building in the Todaiji complex in Nara, was destroyed by fire.” – Miyeko Murase, Book of Dreams
“God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money.” – Quincy Jones (quoted in AARP Bulletin, April 2018)
“All people being equally oppressed is not equality.” – Angela Ross, Facebook, June 14, 2019
“There are never any winners in a knife fight, just different degrees of losers.” – Dominic Gwinn, “I Saw a Man Who Danced with His Wife”
“I try not to talk about being a woman because I don’t want to be defined that way. I try not to talk about religion or politics because I am at odds with the people where I live. I try not to talk about my opinions, because who cares. I try not to talk at all, but sometimes I find myself saying just anything.” – Kathryn Nuernberger, “Float, Cleave”
“Frederick the Great was accustomed to say: ‘The older one gets the more convinced one becomes that his Majesty King Chance does three-quarters of the business of this miserable universe.’ ” — Albet Sorel, The Eastern Question in the Eighteenth Century
“It is no crime that a person’s taste changes according to what he experiences and is exposed to. The youth for example are comforted by exaggerated prattle and obscenity. While the aged prefer speech that is free of such blemishes. Therefore we say that we cannot clearly define the limits of taste, for it is built on habit and familiarity, and those two differ. But one can approximate it when one distinguishes good habits from bad ones through a sound nature and a clear intuition.” – Ahmad Faris Shidyaq, “On Taste” (trans. Rana Issa and Suneela Mubati)
“Bad behavior heralds ruin.” – Jac Jemc, The Grip of It
“Unlasting, what could be forever? Or only what it seemed? Rock corrodes, rivers freeze, fruit rots; stabbed, blood of black and white bleeds alike; trained parrots tell more truth than most, and who is lonelier: the hawk or the worm? Every flowering heart shrivels dry and pitted as the herb from which it bloomed, and while the old man grows spinsterish, his wife assumes a mustache.” – Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
“Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted? For height leads on to height, and there is no resting-place upon them, and rung doth grow upon rung, and there is no limit to the number. Doth not wealth satiate, and become nauseous, and no longer serve to satisfy or pleasure, or to buy an hour’s peace of mind? And is there any end to wisdom that we may hope to reach it? Rather, the more we learn, shall we not thereby be able only to better compass out our ignorance? Did we live ten thousand years could we hope to solve the secrets of the suns, and of the space beyond the suns, and of the Hand that hung them in the heavens? Would not our wisdom be but as a gnawing hunger calling our consciousness day by day to a knowledge of the empty craving of our souls?” – H. Rider Haggard, She
“In this world there are people who are so lonely that
each hand reaching out to them is like a candle in
a dark cave.”
– Peycho Kanev, “The Hope”
“The capitalist machine does not run the risk of becoming mad, it is mad from one end to the other and from the beginning, and this is the source of its rationality. . . . its operation grows more relentless . . . it produces the terrible single class of gray gentlemen . . . it does not run the risk of dying all alone, but rather of making us die, by provoking to the very end investments of desire that do not even go by way of a deceptive and subjective ideology, and that lead us to cry out to the very end, Long live capital . . . . Except in ideology, there has never been a humane, liberal, paternal, etc., capitalism. Capitalism is defined by a cruelty having no parallel in the despotic regime of terror. . . . exploitation grows constantly harsher, lack is arranged in the most scientific of ways . . . . The reproduction of the interior limits of capitalism on an always wider scale has several consequences: it permits increases and improvements of standards at the center, it displaces the harshest forms of exploitation from the center to the periphery, but also multiplies enclaves of overpopulation in the center itself, and easily tolerates the so-called socialist formations. . . . There is no metaphor here: the factories are prisons, they do not resemble prisons, they are prisons. Everything in the system is insane.” – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (trans. Robert Hurley, et al.) (emphases in original)
“How long until I forget nothing in this world belongs to us, not even ourselves?” – Jessica Lynn Suchon, “Ars Poetica with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”
“If people weren’t in such a rush, they’d live twice as long and achieve three times as much.” – Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (trans. Michael Hofmann)
“One does not necessarily die nobly or even quietly after being shot. In most instances it is an excruciating experience.” – Leon Metz, The Shooters
“Life’s a war zone. Death’s the sanctuary. You want to be safe?” – Gordon Lish, Conversations with Gordon Lish (eds. David Winters and Jason Lucarelli)
“There is no predicting who can protect us and who can attack us, nor whom we will harm and whom we will save.” – Paola Peroni, “Protection”
“There’s two roads to take, and they’re both bad.” – Bob Dylan, Nobel Lecture
“Without absolute knowing, subjects are unable to act freely because they posit an authoritative substance that ultimately functions as a barrier to the act. The belief in substance limits what one conceives of as possible. For instance, the subject that believes in the substantiality of God can’t act in a way free of God or the subject that believes in the substantiality of the atom can’t act in a way that would challenge the existence of atoms. Whatever entity has the status of ‘substance’ for the subject impedes the subject’s ability to act freely.” – Todd McGowan, “We Are the Change that We Seek”
“The act of teaching the young so that they can carry our humanity, what we’ve made of ourselves, into future worlds is an act that in a sense defies the forward march of time and the relentless annihilation and oblivion of death. Even as a father’s material being abandons his children, he leaves something of himself behind, often lessons that are unpacked only as his children’s own lives unfold.” – Peter S, Fosl, “You Don’t Know Who You Are”
Especially having to apologize for it laterEspecially having to apologize for it later
“It’s what musicians do when they don’t know what to do anymore. They take out a wineglass or a handkerchief and try to play their cellos with that. Or they rub a balloon and tell people that this is their new instrument. Or they hang on to the bow and toss the cello, and they play their bow on the radiator or piano or a piece of wood. They make a sliding or scratching sound and this is their new music. Or artists, they do it too. They put away their pads and pull stuff out of the garbage. They’ve been doing that for so long, it’s unnerving—this little segment of the population going around, saying that they see art everywhere: trash bin, mountain, sidewalk, plank, person, disease. Some people find it almost annoying.” – Deb Olin Unferth, “Abandon Normal Instruments”
Not to mention luckNot to mention luck
“To be able to die of old age and be put to rest with a lavish funeral required exceptional talent.” – Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain (trans. Mabel Lee)