Quote of the day

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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Don DeLillo from White Noise

...My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps.
Sounds like a boring life.
I hope it lasts forever.


I think I can excplain this better than you.

As a volunteer reader to the blind, Babette had some reservations about the old gent's appetite for the unspeakable and seamy, believing that the handicapped were morally bound to higher types of entertainment. If we couldn't look to them for victories of the human spirit, who could we look to?

Yo, Maia!

Aren’t you going too far?
I’m from New York.


Is that still applicable?

Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.

You know, before we go up or down.

I will read, she said. But I don’t want you to choose anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. ‘I entered her.’ ‘He entered me. We’re not lobbies or elevators. ‘I wanted him inside me,’ as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don’t care what these people do as long as they don’t enter or get entered.

I've never actually been entered myself.

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat.

No, really, wait until it happens to you.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Joseph Heller from Catch--22

Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours.


Expect no hope from me.

But Yossarian knew he was right, because, as he explained to Clevinger, to the best of his knowledge he had never been wrong.

Not unlike you here, right?

He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar.
All right, I'll dance with you, she said, before Yossarian could even speak. But I won't let you sleep with me.
Who asked you? Yossarian asked her.
You don't want to sleep with me? she exclaimed with surprise.
I don't want to dance with you.


Yossarian!

Why don't you use some sense and try to be more like me? You might live to be a hundred and seven, too.
Because it’s better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees, Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. I guess you’ve heard that saying before.
Yes, I certainly have, mused the treacherous old man, smiling again. But I’m afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees. That is the way the saying goes.
Are you sure? Nately asked with sober confusion. It seems to make more sense my way.
No, it makes more sense my way. Ask your friends.


Unless of course it's both.

His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap, he counselled one and all, and everyone said Amen.


Of course that's still going on.

Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.

Or [now] wife, daughter, mother or sister.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Tao Lin from Eeeee Eee Eeee

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.


He learned that from me. And, stick around, you might learn that from me too.

He used to think things like, This organic soymilk will make me healthy and that'll make my brain work better and that'll improve my writing. Also things like, The less I eat the less money I spend on publicly owned companies the less pain and suffering will exist in the world. Now he thinks things like, It is impossible to be happy. Why would anyone think that?

Believe it or not, some actually don't.

Patriotism is the belief that not all human lives are worth the same.

Not even close, right?

A world without right or wrong was a world that did not want itself, anything other than itself, or anything not those two things, but that still wanted something. A world without right or wrong invited you over, complained about you, and gave you cookies. Don't leave, it said, and gave you a vegan cookie. It avoided eye contact, but touched your knee sometimes. It was the world without right or wrong. It didn't have any meaning. It just wanted a little meaning.

Of course: a world beyond good and evil.

Life is meaningless. Everyone knows this. Look at Fernando Pessoa. He knew the most that life was meaningless. But he was always worrying about things. If life was really meaningless you wouldn’t worry about things.

Exactly. But there you go. You worry.

I don’t like happy people, Andrew said. They’re already happy; they don’t need to be liked.

Logic we call it.
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Agent Smith
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by Agent Smith »

"What did he say?"

"He said we shouldn't eat in our cubicles."

"What did she say?"

"She said she'll make sure the coffee machine is cleaned everyday."

"What did you say?"

"I said those are really good ideas."

"What did I say?"

"You said we're really lucky to have such a good boss."

"What did Richard Menton, mayor of Kimil, during our independence day celebrations in Hader hall, 12th September, 1943, say?"

"He said we should upgrade our subway."

"Hehehe."

"Whaat?"
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

The Onion

Area Man Accepts Burden Of Being Only Person On Earth Who Understands How World Actually Works


Next up: Area poster.

Pretentious Baby Who Just Learned Word ‘Daddy’ Won’t Stop Inserting It Into Conversation

Mommy pissed.

Florida Parents Explain Why Michelangelo’s David Is Porn

Cue Loudon Wainwright III

"Grandma Moses she's OK
Never exposes anything; everything's far away
And that statue of David's all right with Jesse
'Cause Michelangelo gave him such a tiny pee-pee"


Woman Puts Off Going To Doctor Until Disease Bad Enough For Him To Believe Her

I've done this myself.

Desperate Trump Flees To Remote Island Of Manhattan

They'll never find him.

Tucker Carlson: ‘Trump Is Being Unfairly Persecuted While There Are Still Blacks’

Sound about right?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. from Slaughterhouse-Five

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."


Try this yourself. Then get back to us.

He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.

Though, sure, the reason can in fact be more complex.

Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.

Yeah, Mom, what about that?

There isn’t any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.

Not unlike my posts here. Whatever that means.

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again. There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said---and calendars.

All that space-time continuum stuff too.

The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.

Next up: the two-dimensional doctors in Flatland.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Thomas Pynchon from Gravity's Rainbow

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.


And boy do they ever!

There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.

The government let's call it.

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

And not just on this planet.

If there is something comforting -- religious, if you want -- about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

What's connected to anything here?

Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.

See, I told you.

There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

On the contrary, I can think of lots of things.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Zadie Smith from White Teeth

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.


They don't call it "rolling the dice" for nothing.

Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.

Generally, this is true.

When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intellect go away. And one third of his religion.

Though, for some, the other way around.

I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.

On the other hand, mine certainly was.

...despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist. But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.

Yeah, AJ, what about that?

That girl, tutted Alsana as her front door slammed, swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter at the same time.

If you get her drift.
promethean75
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by promethean75 »

"perspicuousness is not given to the nature of that which is singular and necessary in the protean struggle for dialectical resolution. abulus derabendum thought Hegel, and the owl of Minerva got stuffed" - Gustave Vanhamsonschmidt
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Cormac McCarthy from No Country for Old Men

It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that is something I don't want to be wrong about.


Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Dasein.


Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference...I got set next to this woman...she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it...She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.

Yep, it does work both ways.

I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.

Pick one, phyllo:
1] determinism
2] free will
3] what's the difference?


People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that, nothing is the same.

See, I told you.

When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way.

That's what they tell me here. Unless, of course, they're wrong.

Do you have any notion of how goddamned crazy you are?

Yo, Ecmandu! Yo, Age!
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Anthony Burgess from A Clockwork Orange

What's all this about sin, eh?
That, I said, very sick. Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music. And then I was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the shape of like a kidney.
Music, said Dr. Brodsky, like musing. So you're keen on music. I know nothing about it myself. It's a useful emotional heightener, that's all I know. Well, well. What do you think about that, eh, Branom?
It can't be helped, said Dr. Branom. Each man kills the thing he loves...


As long as it can't be helped, I suppose.

must take your chance boy. The choice has been all yours.

You know, given free will.

There comes a time, however, when violence is seen as juvenile and boring. It is the repartee of the stupid and ignorant.

And then God invented America.

What sort of world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law nor order no more.

And now, given the space industrial complex, we're going back to the Moon.

You can viddy that everything in this wicked world counts. You can pony that one thing always leads to another. Right right right.

Even when, for others, it's wrong wrong wrong.

What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness?

Unless, of course, God Himself is a sadistic monster.
promethean75
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by promethean75 »

Two whoppers with cheese from your homegirl R. Lichtenstein.

"Superstitious individuals had earlier tried to interpret natural processes as the work of assorted 'spirits' or 'deities', using anthropomorphic language to that end. Subsequently, in more developed class societies, priests and theologians indulged in these thought-forms for ideological reasons, in order to suggest that the natural and social order are 'divinely-ordained', the legitimacy of which not only couldn't, it shouldn't be questioned, let alone resisted. Subsequently, as we can see from the record, Ancient Greek Thinkers began looking for increasingly secular ways of theorising about the world in order to construct a less animistic rationale for the new forms of class society beginning to emerge in the 6th century BC. However, they also retained use of this transformed language, not noticing they had in fact banished the aforementioned 'spirits' and 'gods' in name alone (as Feuerbach half recognised), but the anthropomorphic connotations still lingered on, and there they remain to this day."

"Traditional Theorists would begin to see reality as not simply 'rational', but as ultimately linguistic, constituted by the word of some 'god', or other. In ancient creation myths, the 'Deity' spoke and everything not only popped into existence, it sprang to attention and thereafter always did as it was told. On this view, seemingly inert matter had the capacity to obey orders (but only when addressed with the right sort of language -- hence, once again, the search initiated by generations of sorcerers for these magical words), as if matter was intelligent and possessed of a will of its own. Nature thus came to be viewed as an enchanted 'Being', with 'secrets' hidden 'beneath the surface', and because of the distorted view of language that underpinned it, this 'Being' could be recruited to the 'legitimation' and 'rationalisation' of class power."
promethean75
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by promethean75 »

listen man. the whole progression from the animistic tribal deities to the single monotheistic ruler god runs concurrent with the level of material/economic complexity a society has reached. that is no coincidence. once u have a agrarian society that is accumulating surplus, u create a demand for a new class, an 'administrative' class. within this class - and this wuz the first major division of labor btw - is the legislators and the priests/philosophers. now there will come a point where a single consolidated system of thought will have to emerge to create law and provide stability for this complex society... and those that design this system will invariably come from the wealthy, property owning administrative class; insofar as this society is religious, whatever religious ideas are available are going to include structures of thought that both justify and make necessary the existence of the administrative class and its 'right' to governance. at the core of this will be how property is to be conceived and treated.

now why wouldn't belief in a bunch of warring gods work in a society like this? becuz u have a single, central class trying to hold power.... so whatever god exists has to be the singular representation of that central power (as above so below, the cosmic order here on erf etc.).

in so many words all this means is that any state of a meaningful size is going to carefully codify and proliferate a system of religious thought that protects the property and privilege of the governing administrative class.

don't think for a second that Rome didn't have this in mind when it officiated Chris T. Anity.
promethean75
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by promethean75 »

here's the funny part tho. u read all that and be like 'yo Christianity still makes sense to me regardless of whether or not it's the nefarious design of the ruling class'.

but you're wrong. stuck in their mind meld so let the power of prom compel u. if you'd have been born in india you'd feel the same certainty about Hinduism, and say the same thing about it. so u got where u are by simply being indoctrinated. here's the thing. it's not the content of the thinking of u and the swami (for instance) that matters. it's the delusional nature of it at a deepest of deep emotional level. and this delusional thinking is workable precisely becuz it presents as an emergency (thank pascal for that). even after standing back for a second and looking at what u believe - talking snakes, guys parting seas and healing bling people, virgins giving birth, dead men coming back to life, etc. - the grip the delusion has on u, and the utter emotional turmoil u would feel if u ever found out it was nonsense, is so strong u can't let it go.

meanwhile the Indian and the arab are suffering their version of the same.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Arthur C. Clarke from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Turing had pointed out that, if one could carry out a prolonged conversation with a machine—whether by typewriter or microphones was immaterial—without being able to distinguish between its replies and those that a man might give, then the machine was thinking, by any sensible definition of the word. Hal could pass the Turing test with ease.


Next up: replies that a woman might give.

Jupiter's fly-by had been carried out with impeccable precision. Like a ball on a cosmic pool table, Discovery had bounced off the moving gravitational field of Jupiter, and had gained momentum from the impact. Without using any fuel, she had increased her speed by several thousand miles an hour.
Yet there was no violation of the laws of mechanics; Nature always balances her books, and Jupiter had lost exactly as much momentum as Discovery had gained. The planet had been slowed down - but as its mass was a sextillion times greater than the ship's, the change in its orbit was far too small to be detectable. The time had not yet come when Man could leave his mark upon the Solar System.


Nature's way, let's call it.

There were other thinkers, Bowman also found, who held even more exotic views. They did not believe that really advanced beings would possess organic bodies at all. Sooner or later, as their scientific knowledge progressed, they would get rid of the fragile, disease-and-accident-prone homes that Nature had given them, and which doomed them to inevitable death. They would replace their natural bodies as they wore out—or perhaps even before that—by constructions of metal and plastic, and would thus achieve immortality.

Nope, nothing like that yet, is there?

Science fiction could now be made far more convincing by science fact.

Not counting "beam me up, Scotty", of course.

Poole and Bowman had often humorously referred to themselves as caretakers or janitors aboard a ship that could really run itself. They would have been astonished, and more than a little indignant, to discover how much truth that jest contained.

Yo, Hal!
Before the lobotomy anyway.


Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging flow of information from the news satellites. It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.

Let's call it the Internet.
Only without the pinheads.
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