i agree with your every single word. there is no such information in entire forum which is here in this 1 post.
i 100 percent agree with you. =D> =D>
[b]Dave Eggers
We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown?[/b]
God knows?
Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.
How close is this to utter nonsense?
In her kitchen, she saw many things she would like to eat. On the counter, there was a bunch of new bananas, yellow as a Van Gogh chair, and two apples, pristine. The cabinet was open and she saw a box of crackers, a new box of cereal, a tube of curved chips. She felt overwhelmed, seeing all of the food there, that it was all hers. And there was more in the refrigerator! There were juices, half a melon, a dozen bagels, salmon, a steak, yogurt in a dozen colors. It would take her a week to eat all of this food. She does not deserve this, she thought. It really isn’t fair, she thought. You’re correct, God said, and then struck dead 65,000 Malaysians.
Anyone here know if this is actually true?
The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can’t cut corners.
You know, if that is even an option.
Your life has been lived a hundred times. A thousand times. It’s not all that great, really. Don’t take it so seriously.
Let’s all try this.
If things continue this way, there will be two societies - or at least I hope there will be two - the one you’re helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else.
Unless of course the alternative is even worse.
[b]Robert Cormier
Do I dare disturb the universe?
Yes, I do, I do. I think.
Jerry suddenly understood the poster–the solitary man on the beach standing upright and alone and unafraid, poised at the moment of making himself heard and known in the world, the universe.[/b]
My guess? Jerry will grow out of this.
A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.
My guess? Jerry will grow out of this.
And he did see–that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn’t trust anybody, not even yourself.
My guess? Jerry will not grow out of this.
They tell you to do your own thing but they don’t mean it. They don’t want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too.
And not just Mommy and Daddy.
There was nothing more beautiful in the world than the sight of a teacher getting upset.
Especially when you’re the reason.
She discovered how distant pity was from hate, how very far it was from love.
And isn’t that a pity, he thought.
[b]Werner Twertzog
What if God speaks to us through the bullets of madmen, and we hear nothing?[/b]
Let’s ask God.
It is, of course, not your fault Stan Lee that American “cinema” is a global laughingstock.
The hell it’s not.
Finally, a holiday nihilists can support: Black Friday.
This part in particular: youtu.be/Wks1pLR7Mzo
Thanksgiving is important for relearning that most of your older American relatives are racists, and that their younger relatives are sanctimonious idiots who would have been Nazis.
And not just in the Heartland.
As a boy, I climbed the great oak tree, to speak with God. At the top of that tree were other boys, and also many girls, who would fail in their quests. One by one, they climbed down dejected, while I remained, until the sky darkened, the stars ascended, and I received an answer.
Okay, what was it?
He who does self-checkout has a fool for a grocer.
I’ve never been tempted myself.
[b]David Hockney
The ‘how’ has a great effect on what we see. To say that ‘what we see’ is more important than ‘how we see it’ is to think that ‘how’ has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that ‘how’ often affects ‘what’ we see. [/b]
Does anyone really know what stuff like this means?
The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn’t necessarily be.
I’ve never let it.
How difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don’t.
I actually think I understand this.
You must plan to be spontaneous.
We’ll need some examples of course.
Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look.
For example, by opening your eyes.
When conventions are old, there’s quite a good reason. It’s not arbitrary.
But only the good conventions of course.
[b]tiny nietzsche
fucking interpersonal relationships, how do they work?[/b]
When they work at all in other words.
if wolves want to kill me, they know where I’m at
Dragons too.
I lost my will to power
In a Walmart of all places.
I tried to take a selfie earlier and forgot who I was
I should be so lucky.
ready to put tomorrow behind me
Actually, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
my favorite part of the holiday season is when the drugs kick in
Any day now.
[b]Yuval Noah Harari
You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.[/b]
I’ve never tried to.
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.
Including the parts that actually aren’t.
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.
Someone explain this to, among others, Satyr.
Consistency is the playground of dull minds.
And no one is more consistent here than me, right?
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
Let’s decide if that is still true.
The romantic contrast between modern industry that “destroys nature” and our ancestors who “lived in harmony with nature” is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.
Well, God did give us dominion over all the animals.
[b]Russell Banks
I was afraid of the consequences of my acts in the right way, beyond guilt, but it was too late. I’d already become the person I should have been afraid of becoming.[/b]
Don’t you just hate that?
It’s like a crime is an act that when you’ve committed one the act is over and you haven’t changed inside. But when you commit a sin it’s like you create a condition that you have to live in.
You know, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.
I agree: Both.
…he believes in God the way he believes in politicians—he knows He exists but doesn’t count on Him for anything.
Politicians exist alright. For example, down on the border with Mexico.
It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution! Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!
Either Him or [nowadays] the terrorists.
Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.
Of a certain class in particular.
[b]Philosophy Tweets
“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.” George Eliot[/b]
He means me, right?
Or, sure, you.
“To what purpose should I trouble myself about the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?” Anaximenes
Still, there is really no getting around it, is there?
"Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” Jean-Paul Sartre
So, assuming actual human autonomy, how am I doing here?
“Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.” Simone de Beauvoir
And look where that got her.
“There is nothing without a reason.” Gottfried Leibniz
Uh-oh.
“Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything.” Gottfried Leibniz
Wow, what if that is actually true?
[b]David Sedaris
If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?[/b]
Unless of course he does mean you harm.
Well, that’s a hell of a reason to poison yourself.
Though some no doubt will poison themselves for less.
The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.
Thank God then for the Renaissance .
Cover your glass in France or Germany – even worse, in England – and in the voice of someone who has personally affronted, your host will ask why you’re not drinking.
‘Oh, I just don’t feel like it this morning.’
‘Why not?’
‘I guess I’m not in the mood?’
‘Well, this’ll put you in the mood. Here. Drink up.’
‘No, really, I’m OK.’
‘Just taste it.’
‘Actually, I’m sort of…well, I sort of have a problem with it.’
‘Then how about half a glass?’
I forget how it works in America.
Across town, over in the East Village, the graffiti was calling for the rich to be eaten, imprisoned, or taxed out of existence. Though it sometimes seemed like a nice idea, I hoped the revolution would not take place during my lifetime. I didn’t want the rich to go away until I could at least briefly join their ranks.
The new pragmatism.
Watch, hell, Walt said. This is strip poker. What kind of homo wants to sit around and watch four guys get naked?
Gay or straight, when it comes to strip poker, that’s a pretty good point.
[b]Elena Ferrante
In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.[/b]
Tell me about it.
Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.
Not that we don’t all have one of our own.
Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.
You know, if they’re lucky.
They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.
On average as it were.
Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.
Let’s give them one anyway.
You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.
If only all the way to the grave.
[b]Dylan Thomas
And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim’s Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, Would you like anything to read?[/b]
I guess we’ll never know if they did.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
Or: youtu.be/8-sYXvFenDA
Of course in the end death always does.
I do not need any friends. I prefer enemies. They are better company and their feelings towards you are always genuine.
Fortunately, I have any number of enemies here. 
And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why.
For that matter, wasps and everything else.
I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that’s the record . . .
We’ll have to run this by Ben Sanderson.
This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.
And how more or less obscure is this?
[b]God
How does anyone still believe in Me at this point?[/b]
Well, there’s still the part about tumbling over into the abyss that is oblivion.
The worst natural disaster by far is all of you.
On the other hand, none of us are omnipotent.
152,000 people will die today but not the one you want.
And we know who that is, don’t we?
America is the greatest country in the world at saying it is the greatest country in the world.
Come on, he thought, it’s not altogether out of the question. Well, once Trump is gone.
In honor of the season all masturbation will be sin-free through Christmas.
Or, if you’re an atheist, through Easter.
Trump: “God plays a big role in my life”
I won’t be playing one in your afterlife, I can tell you that.
Seriously though, is that just one more Trump lie?
[b]José Saramago
…we confidently say that it’s not worth trying to reach any conclusions merely because we decide to stop halfway along the path that would lead us straight to them.[/b]
Not counting the times when there may well not be any conclusions that one can reach.
We have deemed all these words necessary in order to explain that we have been traveling more slowly than was predicted, concision is not a definitive virtue, on occasion one loses out by talking too much, it is true, but how much has also been gained by saying more than was strictly necessary.
Cue, among other things “the golden mean”.
God does not forgive the sins He makes us commit.
Can it even be put better than that?
Put less respectfully, these men and women, standing before the mirror of their life, spit every day in the face of what they were with the sputum of what they are.
Can it even be put better than that?
You know, if the shoe fits.
Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
Or as I like to call them, “general descriptions”.
Are dreams perhaps the soul’s memories of the body?
The soul again. Though, sure, why not, point taken.
[b]Jan Mieszkowski
A used copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: $5
A latte: $5
The ability to feign knowledge of Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning: priceless[/b]
And getting more priceless all the time.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to
Marx: change it
Schopenhauer: demonstrate that it has no redeeming value whatsoever
Nietzsche: break it up and sell it for parts
Definitely not Marx of course.
Greek philosophy: Free your mind
German philosophy: Free your will
British philosophy: Free your senses
American philosophy: Free your debt ceiling
While in the drive-thru line at McDonalds.
Don’t stare too long into the void of
18th century: the absolute
19th century: the arbitrary
20th century: the undecidable
Today: your inbox
Or your Facebook account.
Lit Crit 101: Death of the author
Lit Crit 201: Death of the reader
Lit Crit 301: Death of death
Lit Crit 401: What’s on Netflix?
Let’s pin down Lit Crit 501.
What is the good?
Plato: the true
Kant: willing without contradiction
Hegel: the inexorable march of negation
Nietzsche: I’m going to have to go with glam rock
Me too: youtu.be/FRY9K78uDRs
[b]Barbara Kingsolver
A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can’t. That’s all there is to it.[/b]
Come on, you are either in a country legally or you’re not. But point taken.
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides.
Remember when that actually made sense? Nope, me neither.
Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.
On the other hand, novelists write what they know. And lots of real people are embedded in that.
If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
Among other things, describe “improved”.
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
As though that were even possible. The strength of fatherhood too.
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
But why take chances?
[b]Lidia Yuknavitch
I ‘passed’ in every sphere of regular life I entered, but I entered those spheres less and less, and spent more and more time under the overpass.[/b]
Either that or on the recliner.
If the family you came from sucked, make up a new one. Look at all the people there are to choose from. If the family you are in hurts, get on the bus. Like now.
Of course our family is right here.
Where does repressed pain and rage go in a body? Does the wound of daughter turn to something else if left unattended? Does it bloom in the belly like an anti-child, like an organic mass made of emotions that didn’t have anywhere to go? How do we name the pain of rage in a woman?
Not counting the testosterone, the same as men.
People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can’t happen.
Either that or thinking up ways to bring it about.
When they own languages, she thought, we are terrorists. When we own them, we are revolutionaries.
And then around and around we go: genes more or less than memes?
How did she get here, I mean how did she really get here, what were the choices, what’s a past—she takes a long drink—what is psychological development? Is it as fucking Freudian as it sounds? She sighs the big sigh of twenty-six, wondering if we are all trapped inside identity, genetics, and narrative–some whacked-out Kafka god handwriting our unbearable little life stories. Then she thinks the American-artist thought, the rough-and-tumble kind: how can I use this?
Exactly: “I”, the pragmatist: Whatever works.
[b]Existential Comics
The fact that the word “postmodernism” has become almost totally meaningless because it is attached to an almost infinite number of different things is probably the best burn on postmodernism that could have happened.[/b]
Of course what could possibly be more postmodern than that?
If I could go back in time I would have the German FBI investigate Hitler for electoral ethics violations, thus preventing the rise of the Nazis.
My guess: Don Trump fits in here somewhere.
Humans are amazingly adaptable, and are capable of being depressed in almost any environment.
Or, most depressing of all, happy.
In order to not appear biased, we should give both the truth and lies equal time on the news.
In other words, nothing would change.
It’s weird when people see drug companies jacking up the price of insulin to make their shareholders more money while poor people die because they can’t afford it, and say it is capitalism getting corrupted, instead of capitalism getting more pure.
Or maybe we shouldn’t go there.
Decoding phrases used by employers when describing what they want:
“Believes in the company’s mission” = “willing to take less money.”
“Has great work ethic” = “willing to work longer hours.”
“Has a passion for this work” = “willing to take less money while working longer hours.”
Corrupted or pure capitalism?
[b]Vanessa Redgrave
One must never comment as an actor, never show that a character is shallow or vindictive, but let that be conveyed. I mean, none of us thinks of ourselves as being vindictive or shallow - perhaps we should. [/b]
I know: Let’s start here!
I was surprised when I was asked to play Miss Daisy and wondered if I could - only in part because she was Jewish but, also because she was a Southern woman who has hardly opened her mouth before she declares she’s not prejudiced, and yet everything she does shows how totally prejudiced she is.
Like most things of this sort, there’s the shallow and the deep end of the pool.
Theater helps people keep sane.
On the stage more or less than off?
A deeper truth the camera can see can be more surprising than even the director imagined it could be. That’s a wonderful thing that grows and happens in films.
Trust me: more so in some than in others.
The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think.
Anyone here understand them?
An awful lot of filmmaking and playmaking is taken over by marketers and publicists, who set about to tell people what to think. And people feel safer that way. But it’s not safe, and the whole wonderful thing that cinema and filmmakers can contribute is to go into the not-safe land of real life.
Well, they don’t call them “the masses” for nothing.
[b]Elizabeth Hardwick
Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.[/b]
You know, instead of actually going there.
They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.
That’s certainly as close as I ever came.
While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.
Not much left now, he thought.
All of her news was bad and so her talk was punctuated with “of course” and "naturally.”
Sometimes though all of the news can be good.
Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.
Why not just switch on and off? Like in real life.
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
Or here: posts give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
Though not just yours.