a thread for mundane ironists

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4241

[b]William Gaddis

Then, what is sacrilege? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrilege: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacrilegeous work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform.[/b]

More or less Moreno’s point, isn’t it? Remember him?

That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

Or in the vernacular that I prefer: Kids.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

Either that or the fucking music box.

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa…Leonardo had eye trouble…Art couldn’t explain it…But now we’re safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf…

Or maybe we’ll never know for sure.

There’s much more stupidity than there is malice in the world…

How consoling.

I’ll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they’ve stopped caring.

I know: You’re sorry you asked.

4242

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

You kill strangers deliberately so you don’t accidentally kill the people you love.[/b]

Could that possibly make sense?

There’s still a thousand places I haven’t gone to die.

Who the hell would say something like that? Must be a character in a novel.

Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a hundred years from now?

Either then or starting the day you die.

I asked if Tyler was an artist. Tyler shrugged. What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. . . he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler sat in the palm of a perfection he’d created himself. One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

Not bad for an alter ego.

A baby is such a blank slate, like training the understudy for a role you’re planning to leave. You truly hope your replacement will do the play justice, but in secret you want future critics to say you played the character better.

Yes, people do think like this. On purpose.

Really, just looking around, you feel a twinge of pity for the poor souls who succeeded in getting past the Pearly Gates. One can’t help but picture the lackluster VIP lounge in Heaven, a kind of nonalcoholic ice-cream social starring Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mahatma Gandhi. Hardly anyone’s idea of a “with-it” social register.

On the other hand, almost anything beats oblivion.

4243

[b]Robert A. Heinlein

English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing.[/b]

Usually [of course] it’s the other way around.

Learn to say No—and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you.

More to the point: Learn to say Maybe. In other words, learn how to.

I happen to be of an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman—which means I can be a real revolting son of a bitch when it suits me.

You know, if they deserve it.

Straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in all law schools.

They don’t call it “the paper chase” for nothing.

The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it — once you can honestly say, ‘I don’t know’, then it becomes possible to get at the truth.

Right. And guess whose truth that will be?

Hit it! You have to hit it harder than that. Electrons are timid little things but notional; you have to let them know who’s boss.

I know: A large hadron collider that circles the globe. Or goes to the Moon and back.

4244

[b]Salman Rushdie

When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far.[/b]

On the other hand, do characters in books have free will? Or, more intriguing still: Do those who write them?

Somewhere in the existing software there was a bug, a potentially lethal flaw. Nothing less than the unselfing of the self would do. If he could cleanse the whole machine, then maybe the bug, too, would end up in the trash. After that, he could perhaps begin to construct a new man.

The bug [one suspects] being dasein. So good luck with that.

…to admit we do not understand a phenomenon is not to admit the presence of the miraculous but merely, reasonably, to accept the limitations of human knowledge. God was invented to explain what our ancestors couldn’t comprehend: the radiant mystery of being. The existence of the incomprehensible, however, is not a proof of god.

Right, like that’ll ever stop 'em.

Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best…

And, in the end, you’re no better off with it.

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called “Rushdie,” and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.

You know, as a fatwa survivor.

…the children of the hour of darkness were born, I’m afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.

Conflicted in other words.

4245

[b]Leo Tolstoy

How can one be well when one suffers morally?[/b]

And, In this day and age, there seems but one practical solution: To go beyond good and evil. With no guarantees though.

Every heart has its own skeletons.

And not just in the closet.

It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

Right, and then later He explains why.

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

I know: How’s that working out for us?

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

In other words [perhaps] better to be born a slave.
That among other things.

I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible…except by getting off his back.

Not hard to imagine. But only of others of course.

4246

[b]Sigmund Freud

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.[/b]

Come on, few will ever really be honest about it. Besides, no one really knows what that means.

Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation.

And he actually demonstrated this…how?

Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.

Dope preferably.

In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.

Not counting those who don’t even know it. Or, sure, counting them in particular.

I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world.

It’s so fucking obvious, isn’t it?

I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.

Yes, even in Britain. And Texas.

4247

[b]Ian McEwan

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home–Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?[/b]

And then there are those who loll about for years reading this shit. Superior to, among others, no one.

Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes.

Just what the world needs: More little Turds. :wink:

What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?

Usually of course it’s the other way around. Just ask the men here.

Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he’s sincere. And once he’s sincere, all deception vanishes.

Let’s file this one under, “abracadabra!”

I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore…it’s in the stars!

Unless it really isn’t in the stars at all.

Perhaps I’d been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don’t have to comply with a request just because it’s reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no.

I have more or less perfected it you might say.

4248

[b]Michio Kaku

We have learned more about the brain in the last fifteen years than in all prior human history, and the mind, once considered out of reach, is finally assuming center stage.[/b]

Hmm. Maybe they’ll discover the gene for objectivism.

…the laws of physics, carefully constructed after thousands of years of experimentation, are nothing but the laws of harmony one can write down for strings and membranes. The laws of chemistry are the melodies that one can play on these strings. The universe is a symphony of strings. And the “Mind of God,” which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace.

With unimaginable violence on percussion.

…sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne once wrote, “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?”

We still don’t really know, do we?

For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice.

And [so far] going all the way back to the caves.

Gossiping is essential for survival because the complex mechanics of social interactions are constantly changing, so we have to make sense of this ever-shifting social terrain. This is Level II consciousness at work. But once we hear a piece of gossip, we immediately run simulations to determine how this will affect our own standing in the community, which moves us to Level III consciousness. Thousands of years ago, in fact, gossip was the only way to obtain vital information about the tribe. One’s very life often depended on knowing the latest gossip.

He thought: Thank god for celebrities!

This means that, in some sense, free will is a fake. Decisions are made ahead of time by the brain, without the input of consciousness, and then later the brain tries to cover this up (as it’s wont to do) by claiming that the decision was conscious. Dr. Michael Sweeney concludes, “Libet’s findings suggested that the brain knows what a person will decide before the person does. … The world must reassess not only the idea of movements divided between voluntary and involuntary, but also the very idea of free will.” All this seems to indicate that free will, the cornerstone of society, is a fiction, an illusion created by our left brain. So are we masters of our fate, or just pawns in a swindle perpetuated by the brain?

But then we must go right back to the implications of this for, say, the Nazis. Or for folks like Turd and Satyr. :-"

4249

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Psychoanalyses:
British: good object, bad object, death drive
French: repetition, jouissance, death drive
American: Time’s up! $300, please[/b]

For weeks and weeks on end too.

It’s Monday. Must I despair?
Kant: No, reason bests despair
Kierkegaard: No, melancholia bests despair
Camus: Yes, just like every other day

Still, you can’t help but wonder: Is there despair where they are now?

True philosophical inquiry begins in…
Aristotle: wonder
Descartes: doubt
Kierkegaard: dread
Heidegger: anxiety
Sartre: an amphetamine haze

Still, you can’t help but wonder: Is there true philosophical inquiry where they are now?

Classical Aesthetics: Beauty is divine
Romantic Aesthetics: The infinite is sublime
Modern Aesthetics: I hear art is still a good investment

Soup cans, for example.

Freedom
1781: Cast off the yoke of serfdom
1917: Cast off the yoke of capitalist imperialism
2016: Accidentally leave your phone at home

You know, if you can afford one.

Myers-Briggs Personality Type: LMAO

Finally!

4250

[b]Hilary Mantel

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.[/b]

Those teeth, those teeth, those teeth.

Let’s say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.
How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

Let’s call it, say, the military industrial complex. Until something better comes along.

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

So, have you reached that part yet?

It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

Must be the one that I started.

A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

And not just Donald Trump.

I was always desired. But now I am valued. And that is a different thing, I find.

Sure, and all the way to the bank.

4251

[b]Ursula K. Le Guin

Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As . . . Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next ― its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc. ,etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use.[/b]

Dasein is as good a word as any to start a sentence with, right?

Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won’t talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something.

Or something, definitely.

And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.

The world of commodities. And nothing is not one, right?

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if theses faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality.

Probably bullshit, but maybe not.

You always have to defend the imagination against idiots.

Objectivists, in other words.

I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. I’m not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing.

Maybe just a particular mood, or maybe a full-blown existential crisis.

4252

[b]The Dead Author

Optimism: I can change my life.
Pessimism: I can’t change my life.
Conformism: I will change my life.[/b]

Into someone else’s. Into someone like, say, Satyr. After all, isn’t that the part these meatminds always seem to miss?

History of Philosophy
Marx: read Hegel.
Nietzsche: read Marx.
Heidegger: read Nietzsche.
Sartre: read Heidegger.
Derrida: don’t read Sartre.

Tongue in cheek as it were.

Self-confidence is God’s gift to fools.

Of course we see that here all the time, don’t we?

Optimists prefer Tolstoy.
Pessimists prefer Dostoevsky.
Realists admit that they haven’t actually read them.

True story [mine]: lots of Dostoevsky, little of Tolstoy. But then you figured that, right?

Monday: I have so much to do but my life feels empty.
Friday: I have nothing to do but my life feels full.

I know: Go figure.

Monday is like death. Either it motivates you to do something or it makes you wonder what the whole point is.

Not unlike all the rest of them.

4253

[b]Jeff Lindsay

Weren’t we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor’s children?[/b]

That’s certainly one way to look at it.

You’re driving me normal!

Something he clearly is not.

I’m not sure what I am. I just know there’s something dark in me. I hide it. I certainly don’t talk about it, but it’s there always, this Dark Passenger. And when he’s driving, I feel alive, half sick with the thrill of complete wrongness.

Dexter, meet Immanuel Kant.
Can’t you just imagine it?

Whatever made me the way I am left me hollow, empty inside, unable to feel. It doesn’t seem like a big deal. I’m quite sure most people fake an awful lot of everyday human contact. I just fake it all.

Of course we know what made him the way he is. We just refuse to admit that it could ever happen to us.

But as I have noticed on more than one occasion, life itself is unfair, and there is no complaint department, so we might as well accept things the way they happen, clean up the mess, and move on.

He had his way, I have mine.

Life’s only obligation, after all, was to be interesting.

That and getting away with it.

4254

[b]Tony Kushner

Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.[/b]

You know, if you believe in that sort of thing. I don’t. But it’s just so beautifully written.

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That’s how people change.

Nope, it just doesn’t have that ring of truth, does it?

I just wondered what a thing it would be…if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free.
It would be…heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and…
Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unemcumbered, into the morning.

Just like every other snake.

I’ve lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough. It’s so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere. But not one that I can find.

Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.

Not too much though.

I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.

AIDS. Back then.

4255

[b]Walker Percy

Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive.[/b]

Of course we know the mystery he’s lost in now.

Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.

You either get this or you don’t. Or you think you do.

It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.

On the other hand, most folks will settle for a whole lot less.

Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

The Look. Didn’t Sartre write a 600 page tome explaining this?

Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.

Don’t you just hate that?

Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?

I’ll let you know when it happens.

4256

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.[/b]

You know, like bringing analytic philosophy down to earth.

Madeline began hearing people saying “Derrida”. She heard them saying “Lyotard” and “Foucault” and “Deleuze” and “Baudrillard”. That most of these people were those she instinctually disapproved of — upper-middle-class kids who wore Doc Martens and anarchist symbols — made Madeline dubious about the value of their enthusiasm.

Let’s deconstruct this. Just for the hell of it.

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents?

It just dawned on me that they may well have had one.

There was nowhere to go that wouldn’t be me.

Least of all here.

Just like ice, lives crack, too.

Most however just melt away.

Fiction should be specific rather than general, because people are specific.

Would that philosophy might be the same. Rather than, say, the intellectual glop that passes for philosophy here.

4257

[b]Lionel Shriver

The word love was required to cover such a range of emotions that it almost meant nothing at all.[/b]

The word free too.

We all do it, we all know we all do it, but it isn’t customary to say, "Honey, could you keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce, because I’m going to go masturbate.”

Two words:
1] Internet
2] porn.

I bask in their heatedness as before a woodstove. My own apathy is bone chilling.

Really though you can get used to it.

All these men afraid of bein’ crowded, ain’t they? They need all this room, they afraid some woman gonna crawl in their head and take over. Well, surprise, surprise. Ain’t nobody crawlin’ in there ’cept you, honey, and you get older and older and it get stuffy in there. Let me tell you, you afraid of other folks takin’ away your elbow room, well, just relax. You born alone, you die alone, and you get any kind of company in between, you one lucky boy. Bein’ by yourself ain’t no accomplishment. Ain’t like being no kind of hero. Ray, see, Ray sho ’nough figures he gettin’ away with somethin’, understand me? He think he a clever boy, runnin’ round with whores, gettin’ diseases, drinkin’ his heart out till five in the a.m. Lucky Ray, huh? Well, what Raymond Harris gettin’ away with is not see his kids grow up, and when he do come back they call him Mr. Harris ’steada Daddy, and they shake his hand ’steada kiss his cheek, and they spit when he turn his back. And I spit, too, though I’ll take him in again and love him, ’cause that’s what I’s here to do. But I spit anyways, ’cause he such a dumb sucker, understand me? ’Less stupid ole Ray Harris die by hisself in some alleyway. Sho, run away. Best way in the world to be nothin’. Risk endin’ up croaked by garbage cans, when he could die in my arms? Leonia put her coffee cup in its saucer, and it rattled softly. That no way to be the big man, baby. That just be dumb and sad. You got me?

Some men get it, some men don’t. Me? Maybe.

Having buck teeth in junior high, she rounded up unsteadily, must be ideal preparation for getting old. For pretty people, aging is a dumb shock. It’s like, what’s going on? Why doesn’t anyone smile at me at checkout anymore? But it won’t be a shock for me. It’ll be, oh that. That again. Teeth.

Right, like you’re actually lucky to be born ugly.

…as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn’t count.

Starting with, for example, God.

4258

[b]William Gaddis

The function of this school is custodial. It’s here to keep these kids off the streets until the girls are big enough to get pregnant and the boys are old enough to go out and hold up a gas station.[/b]

And not just in the ghetto. Or not anymore.

We’ve had the goddam Ages of Faith, we’ve had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the goddam Age of Publicity.

To which we are all entitled [as with fame] to 15 minutes.

He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as “rank presumption”.

No doubt those are tough points to sell.

What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey.

Unintended consequences. In other words, what else is new?

He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion.

And you can’t help but wonder what it will mutate into next.

Get a black suit and just freeload, problem it’s too God damned late now even to be any of the things I never wanted to be.

And who hasn’t thought that.

4259

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

No mat­ter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.[/b]

Me? You can just imagine it, right?

Suicide is very contagious.

Not that anyone ever followed my lead.
Perhaps if I had been sucessful.

He was the kind of boy any young girl should date while she’s still able to recover.

And now of course: She was the kind of girl any young boy should date while he’s still able to recover.

A shadow
of a reflection
of an image
of an illusion.

of a philosophy of life.

The evil queen was stupid to play Snow White’s game. There’s an age where a woman has to move on to another kind of power. Money, for example. Or a gun.

Come on, it was after all a Disney production.

So if reality is all a spell, and you don’t really want what you think you want… If you have no free will. You don’t really know what you know. You don’t really love who you only think you love. What do you have left to live for?

That’s what horoscopes are for. Right, Jacob? :wink:

4260

[b]Robert A. Heinlein

The Universe was a damned silly place at best . . . but the least likely explanation for its existence was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that some abstract somethings “just happened” to be some atoms that “just happened” to get together in configurations which “just happened” to look like consistent laws and then some of these configurations “just happened” to possess self-awareness and that two such “just happened” to be the Man from Mars and the other a bald-headed old coot with Jubal himself inside.

No, Jubal would not buy the “just happened” theory, popular as it was with men who called themselves scientists. Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe–in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.[/b]

I just happen to believe this.

Come Judgment Day, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.

Not a chance, right Turd?
[among others]

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

Let’s call them objectivists.

But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing, I became too stinkin’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees.

Great, another intellectual snob.

All those religions–they contradict each other on every point but every one of them is filled with ways to help people to be brave enough to laugh even though they know they are dying.

That’s the whole point of it though. Not counting all the others.

In Wilson’s scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality.

Okay, so what’s on the menu?