Quote of the day

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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Samuel Beckett from Waiting for Godot

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.


Of course, there's not much that isn't true of.

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

Of course, there's not much that is actually true of.

Let's go.
We can't.
Why not?
We're waiting for Godot.


That's from a play, I think.

There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.

Not that it can't actually be his boots.

I can't go on like this.
That's what you think.


Been there yet yourself?

That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.

When it's not a bastard of an earth.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.


Trust me: not just her love. Or his either.

We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

No, really, and not just in novels.

Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!

Nope, didn't work. How about for you?

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

Though ours especially.

...a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

Good thing we don't have any.

We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions --- love, antipathy, charity, or malice ---and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

Let's decide: for better or for worse?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Sylvia Plath from The Bell Jar

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, ‘Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’
‘No, what?’ I would say.
‘A piece of dust.’
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, ‘So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.’
And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.


To have actually known her, he pondered.

The more hopeless you were, the farther away they hid you.

They do things like that.

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

Next up: I moved in front of the oven.

It was like the first time I saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

Want to hear about my first time?

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him. The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.

Ted too eventually.

A time of darkness, despair, disillusion---so black only the inferno of the human mind can be---symbolic death, and numb shock---then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration.

Or not of course.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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William S. Burroughs from Naked Lunch

The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.


Your total need...then mine.

If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process...

Or, for others, philosophy of course.

Well, as one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.'

Either/or!

You see, control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk.

Let's note all the countless exceptions.

Exterminate all rational thought.

Or let the [double entendre] dope do it.

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time...

Not counting all the times that he is. Or even early.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Don DeLillo from White Noise

He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.


So, given my own dissatisfactions, am I entertaining enough for you here?

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

Uh oh...that part again.

'Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'
'What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing.'


My guess: it's different for all of us.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.'

My guess: maybe not.

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

Nope, I still don't need it myself.

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

Or dumped to a much, much lower level.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Harold Pinter

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.


Coming here?

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

Coming here?

I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

You know, if it comes to that.

It’s very difficult to feel contempt for others when you see yourself in the mirror.

Hey, don't look at me.

I'll tell you what I really think about politicians. The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flame thrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire from them how they would assess the action from a political point of view.

Now that takes me back!!

When you lead a life of scholarship you can't be bothered with the humorous realities, you know, tits, that kind of thing.

Not to mention the real world.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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The Onion

Man Credits Great Kissing Skills To Growing Up With Lots Of Sisters


Yo, Nancy!

Man Worried Harassing Messages He Sending On Dating App Getting Lost Among Abuse From Other Guys

Let's help him out?

11-Year-Old Moron Can’t Wait To Get Her First Period

Let's decide: Is that fair?

Chicago Tapes Saran Wrap Over City Borders To Cut Down On Heating Costs

You know, the other Chicago.

Relaxed Marie Kondo Now Says She Perfectly Happy Living In Waist-High Sewage

You tell me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Kondo

U.S. Officials Call For Correct Amount Of Violence

Or, here: correct amount of ad homs. Let's that started, assholes.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Mark Z. Danielewski from House of Leaves

“To read" actually comes from the Latin reri "to calculate, to think" which is not only the progenitor of "read" but of "reason" as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein "to fit." Aside from giving us "reason," arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma meaning "weapons." It seems that "to fit" the world or to make sense of it requires either reason or arms.”


Figures.

I think that's what finally stopped me. I slid right to the edge. My legs were hanging over. And I could feel it too. I don't know how. There was no wind, no sound, no change of temperature. There was just this terrible emptiness reaching up for me.

Well, of course.
That's what I'd have told him.


Explanation is not half as strong as experience but experience is not half as strong as experience and understanding.

My guess: we'll need a context.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

Next up: posts.

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.

Next up: ethics.

Knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space.

Your knowledge might be different. I know that mine is.
tonterias
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Re: Quote of the day

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When the majority of people start believing in something, that's the time to seriously question it.

J.L.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Virginia Woolf from To the Lighthouse

What is the meaning of life? That was all---a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.


Nope, no little miracles today.

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others...and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

Trust me: by ever and always being alone.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have---to want and want---how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

If only all the way to the grave.

She felt...how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

Or a smash into the wall.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

So they tell me.

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

Or dreamily half awake.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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The Onion

Man Arriving Late Forced To Use Excuse He Was Saving For Leaving Early


Bummer.

Man Ice Skating For First Time Really Getting Hang Of Clutching Wall

Some never do.

Green Comet Slows Down To Gawk As It Passes Totally Wrecked Planet

You know, if that's even possible.

Biden Casually Tells National Prayer Breakfast He’s Been To Heaven Several Times

This and, God assured him, Trump is going straight to Hell.

Woman Puts On True Crime Podcast To Entertain Herself While Cleaning Up Husband’s Entrails

Two birds, one stone.

Study Finds Not Acting Like Total Fucking Moron Most Attractive Quality In Potential Mate

Not here of course.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Tom Stoppard from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Give us this day our daily mask.


He means masks, of course. Plural.

Uncertainty is the normal state.

Anyone here not certain of that?

Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone---it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says--- 'One day you are going to die'.

Let alone what I do here.

I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.

No, really, what if you did?!

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?

Or, for that matter, a straw.

Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.

I'll chance it myself.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Erich Maria Remarque from All Quiet on the Western Front

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.


Next up: the Second World War.

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

Next up: the Second World War.

But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

Tell that to the "masters of war"...to those who own and operate the military industrial complex.

It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.

Next up: the unhappiness here.

We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

Alone works for me. Though not terribly.

We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.

You know, eventually.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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The Onion

Nation Surrenders To Chinese Balloon


Deep State still insisting it shot it down.

Florida Board Of Education Removes Africa From World Maps

Replaced with snow white Antarctica. But no one is fooled.

Newly Discovered Sketches Reveal Regional Chain Restaurants Lewis And Clark Encountered On Expedition Across America

Owned and operated by Native Americans of course.

Walmart Destroys Another Local Business

It's in the millions by now.

Whites Ousted From Role As Master Race After Racist Past Comes To Light

Alexis Jacobi shits himself!!

Deep Down, Area Man Knows He’s Not Done Vomiting

Next up: not done shitting.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Jean-Paul Sartre from No Exit

So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!


As though that's all they were. But, no doubt about it, point taken.

You are your life, and nothing else.

An existential thing let's call it.

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

Not unlike what they're thinking about you.

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

Nausea let's call it.

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

Philosophy let's call it.

There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror. And then, next day, you didn't know what to make of it, you couldn't interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before.

Next up: the day after that.
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