Category: Quotes
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E.B. White on Raising Chickens: “I sometimes think I am crazy —everybody else fighting and dying or working for a cause or writing to his senator, and me looking after some Barred Rock chickens. But the land, and the creatures that go with it, are what is left that is good, and they are the…
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On Bad Feelings as Messengers: “Stress, unhappiness, anxiety, and depression are not bad things. They are not human malfunctions. Quite the opposite, they are proof that everything is working as it should. They come to us as messengers, to tap us on the shoulder and point out that our lives have slipped out of alignment.” …
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I remember having much more extensive notes on this book, but I still have plenty of quotes. Paul Goodman on Abstractions: “The buoyant abstractions, spoken as if miracles were for the asking, ward off pain and uneasy conscience when one is no longer going to try to do anything practical.” Paul Goodman on Absurd Ideas:…
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Adam Savage on the Internet: “The internet is far from fulfilling its promise to be the compendium of all human knowledge, it’s more like the outline or the index. But where it shines is in giving people all over the planet the ability to find a peer group of enthusiasts with which to share their…
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Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Why They Wrote Deep Space and Sacred Time: “…we were faced with the universal parental problem of how passively we should admit media fantasies into our family’s cultural life.” At family dinners, they’d find themselves disassembling favorite television shows “to see how they ‘work’ both as pleasure-giving entertainment and…
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I never got past more than a few chapters of this book, but the notes I took on the preface (written by Saul Bellow) and the first three or four chapters are extensive enough that it seems worth sharing them. … From the Foreword Written by Saul Bellow: On Academics : “Academics, even those describing…
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I love how Dana envisions the “common reader” — not the “incurious mass audience of the popular media” but rather “the idea of the general reader envisioned by Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf felt the vitality of literature depended — the intelligent, engaged non-specialist.” The first essay is the titular piece. It begins “American poetry…
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This isn’t Carl Sagan’s best book, but it was his last, and it has plenty of good stuff to say. … Chapter 5 is about “Four Cosmic Questions” 1st cosmic question: “Was there ever life on Mars?” 2nd cosmic question: “Is Titan a laboratory for the origins of life?” 3rd cosmic question: “Is there intelligent…
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Bertrand Russell on Common Words and Proper Names: “Common words, even proper names, are usually really descriptions. That is to say, the thought in the mind of a person using a proper name correctly can generally only be expressed explicitly if we replace the proper name by a description.” See, there really is something in…
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From Anthony Veasna So, “baby yeah” Brilliant writer who “accidentally” overdosed in 2020. “My friend and I saw each other as hopeless writers, misunderstood prophets, critics of our cultural moment who rejected obvious and reductive politics. We never indulged in ordinary pursuits because we yearned to write masterpieces, timeless works infused with nihilistic joy and…