May 2012
19 posts
April 2012
64 posts
“It is the part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it. To return not only spoils a trip, but tarnishes a memory. It is only in the mind that shining adventure remains forever bright.”
—from A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
“When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experiences, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.”
—from A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
“All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”
—
From Denis Johnson’s “Beverly Home,” Jesus’ Son
“Growth is, in fact, almost synonymous with the market economy that prevails today. That fact finds its clearest expression in the marketplace maxim, “Grow or die.” We live in a competitive world in which rivalry is a law of economic life; profit, a social as well as personal desideratum; limit or restraint, an archaism; and the commodity, a substitute for the traditional medium for establishing economic relationships—namely, the gift.”
—
“Death of a Small Planet,” Murray Bookchin
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/planet/planet.html
“The same shows were always playing when we made love. They were stupid shows, Saturday-night shows. But I was afraid to make love to her without the conversations and laughter from that false universe playing in our ears, because I didn’t want to get to know her very well, and didn’t want to be bridging any silences with our eyes.”
—
From Denis Johnson’s “Beverly Home,” Jesus’ Son
“This is important for me to point out— that sometimes when I think that I’m right, it can be a real source of contention between me and people who I’m close to. And the reason it’s a source of contention, is that I’m right.”
—Mike Birbiglia
This episode is so good, didn’t even care it was a rerun. (via oprahisgay)
This episode is so good, didn’t even care it was a rerun. (via oprahisgay)
“If the syntax of loyalty is not tragic
then what is the wager?
If there were time, would it be ours?” —
then what is the wager?
If there were time, would it be ours?” —
“True Discourse on Power” by Peter Gizzi
...the present crisis will not disappear with a switch of channels.
“On a single day, June 23, 1989, three major spills—off Newport, Rhode Island, in the Delaware River, and on the Texas Gulf Coast—dumped a total of well over one million gallons of oil into U.S. waters.
Many find it difficult to see these incidents as part of a continuum that has a common source. To trace a chain of events from its cause to its consequence is an unfamiliar task for people who have been conditioned to see life as a television sit-com or talk show composed of discrete self-contained, anecdotal segments. We live, in effect, on a diet of short takes, devoid of logic or long-range effect. Our problems to the extent that we recognize them as problems at all-are episodic rather than systemic; the scene dissolves, the camera moves on.”
-Murray Bookchin, “Death of a Small Planet”
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/planet/planet.html
“To catch the bus home each day I walked through a vacant lot, and sometimes I’d run right up on one—one small orange flower that looked as if it had fallen down here from Andromeda, surrounded by a part of the world cast mainly in eleven hundred shades of brown, under a sky whose blueness seemed to get lost in its own distances.”
—
From Denis Johnson’s “Beverly Home,” Jesus’ Son
“Govinda had become a monk and thousands of monks were his brothers, wore the same gown, shared his beliefs and spoke his language. But he, Siddhartha, where did he belong? Whose life would he share? Whose language would he speak? At that moment, when the world around him melted away, when he stood alone like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy despair, but he was more firmly himself than ever. That was the last shudder of his awakening, the last pains of birth. Immediately he moved on again and began to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer homewards, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards.”
—Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
“No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.”
—
From Denis Johnson’s “Beverly Home,” Jesus’ Son
“I was a whimpering dog inside, nothing more than that. I looked for work because people seemed to believe I should look for work, and when I found a job I believed I was happy about it because these same people—counselors and Narcotics Anonymous members and such—seemed to think a job was a happy thing.”
—From Denis Johnson’s “Beverly Home,” Jesus’ Son
