June 2013
“One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”
—Michael Cunningham
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”
—
George W. Bush
[I’m not sure whether I ought to laugh or cry after reading this quote.]
“Given how much we watch and what watching means, it’s inevitable, for those of us fictionists or Joe Briefcases who fancy ourselves voyeurs, to get the idea that these persons behind the glass—persons who are often the most colorful, attractive, animated, alive people in our daily experience—are also the people who are oblivious to the fact that they are watched. This illusion is toxic. It’s toxic for lonely people because it sets up an alienating cycle (viz. “Why can’t I be like that?” etc.), and it’s toxic for writers because it leads us to confuse actual fiction-research with a weird kind of fiction-consumption. Self-conscious people’s oversensitivity to real humans tends to put us before the television and its one-way window in an attitude of relaxed and total reception, rapt. We watch various actors play various characters, etc. For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching. Plus the idea that the single biggest part of real watchableness is seeming to be unaware that there’s any watching going on. Acting natural. The persons we young fiction writers and assorted shut-ins study, feel for, feel through most intently are, by virtue of a genius for feigned unself-consciousness, fit to stand people’s gazes. And we, trying desperately to be nonchalant, perspire creepily on the subway.”
—
David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (via spectaculardistractions)
This might have just changed my life!
(via machina-analytica)
“My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn’t have any excuse to be stupid.”
—Joan Bauer; Rules of the Road
Father's Day is just another day . . .
“My parents were divorced when I was two years old. They were divorced in a day when the divorce rate was around 10% as opposed to today’s 50%. Divorce was rare back then, and I was considered “stained” by some of the people in my small west Texas hometown. My first memories of my father were when he and my mother were separated. He would bring women that he was fucking around with to our house. It tore my mother’s heart out. I grew up seeing her cry, a lot. He then left my mother to raise three kids on her own. We were so poor back then, we were forced to move back to my mother’s home town so my grandparents could help raise us and provide for us. My father never, ever, helped support us monetarily, nor emotionally for that matter.
My father never showed up for any of my little league baseball games, he was never there when I learned to play a musical instrument, he never picked me up when I fell down, and he never encouraged me. He was never around. The few times he was around, he was critical and selfish. He made sure that I knew I was merely an inconvenience to him.
If you have a father that loved you, stayed put and helped raise you, consider yourself blessed. Love your father back, make him aware that you appreciate his steadfastness. But keep in mind, some of us never experienced a father like that. So for me, father’s day is just another day.”—TBV
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
—Leo Tolstoy; Family Happiness
“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.” —Tahereh Mafi; Shatter Me
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.” —Tahereh Mafi; Shatter Me
“
“Have you really read all those books in your room?”
Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.”
” —John Green; Looking for Alaska
“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”
—Albert Camus, from “Notebooks, 1951-1959” (via mirroir)
