"The scientific truth takes from us a little piece of the dream, but that is the risky way of knowledge"- Sabastien Vatinel (As quoted in Dark Archives by Megan Rosenbloom, p.206)
Nice. I knew I recognised that name from somewhere. I'm a big fan of Caitlin Doughty and have been watching her videos for years. Read all three of her books, too. Should probably read something from Rosenbloom...
Ive read 2 of doughty's books (on hold for her 3rd) and am working my way through her history videos. You should read Rest in Pieces by Bess Lovejoy. She's one of their associates and her stuff is great too!
". . . I heard as in a dream the far-off clamour of the outside world . . . but there was no reality, no allurement in the sound. I saw men carrying trivial burdens with an air of immense effort, of grotesque self-importance; scurrying in breathless haste on useless errands, gorging food without relish; sleeping without refreshment; taking their leisure without enjoyment; living without the knowledge of content; dying without ever having lived. .. ." -James Norman Hall, after getting an old newspaper from a passing ship while living on a boat anchored in an atoll in the Tuamoto islands.
Never go back. Never go back. Never return to the haunts of your youth. Keep to the track, to the beaten track. Memory holds all you need of the truth. -Felix Dennis
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl. - H. L. Mencken
"He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast." Leonardo da Vinci
One of my worst (I think) writing habits is that I always want to put an epigraph in front of everything. So I've been collecting quotes which I think would fit for my current WIP. Here's one, from HP Lovecraft: "I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living."
It's not long after burning books to burning people..Eric Heffer..politician.. bibliophile...commenting on the Satanic Verses reaction
We make boxes that seem to enclose a satisfying number of human experiences, and then we put labels on those and argue about them instead, The boxes change over time, according to a process which is governed by, as far as I can tell, cycles of human suffering: We realize that forcing people into the last set of boxes was painful and wrong, we wring our hands, we fold up some new boxes and assure ourselves that this time we got it right, or at least right enough for now. Because we need the boxes to argue over. I do not want to be in a box. I want to sift through your fingers, to vanish, to be unseen. - Isabel Fall
"If you can think, and speak, and write, you are absolutely deadly. Learn to write because writing is thinking formalized. First, you need a problem. A problem that grips you so that you feel a desire to investigate. The next thing you need to do is have something to say about the issue. Reading is brilliant for that. You should read as much as you can about that which addresses the problem. You now have new information at your disposal, and it’s your job to elegantly formulate that - while being precise in your word choice. You then organize your sentences correctly. And your paragraphs. Hopefully, now the whole thing is coherent enough to make sense. While this is happening, you are sharpening your tools and integrating your personality at the highest and most abstract level of organization. You’re learning to think. You gain the ability to think by first learning to write. Pick some severe problems and learn to write very, very carefully. If you are a competent writer, speaker - communicator - you have all of the authority and competence that there is." —Jordan Peterson
"Well, all I'm saying is that I want to look back and say that I did I the best I could while I was stuck in this place. Had as much fun as I could while I was stuck in this place. Played as hard as I could while I was stuck in this place. Dogged as many girls as I could while I was stuck in this place." ~ Don Dawson from Dazed and Confused
“I cherish a question my grandson asked me the other day, when he said, Grandpa, were you a hero in the war? Grandpa said no.... but I served in a company of heroes.” ~ Major Richard Winters
Rather like the British Para's surrounded in Arnhem and the SS colonel shouts "Surrender" and the British commander shouts back "sorry old boy, we don't have room for prisoners" (unfortunately that's probably apocryphal, its in the film, but i doubt it really happened)
"Half of the buildings look like the boxes that the other half came in." --Donald Westlake, on the New York City skyline.
"Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men. It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest." – Ty Cobb I feel like it works just as well for writing.
Maybe 100 years ago when Cobb played. Baseball is all about the mollycoddles now... whatever those are.
In Calvin Bedient's review of Ted Hughes’s ‘Tales of Ovid’: “Everything - war, childbirth, the weather, laughter, love - is galvanised into the improbable: even the prodigious wears a fright wig... Occasionally the phrases are welded in a series of brass knuckles... All together, it is as if Billy the giant had chosen to speak with the lexical minciness of an Elizabethan page. The language attempts to squeeze every thrill out of its subjects and yet to be priggishly superior to them. It turns to Shakespeare as to stilts...”
