Quote of the day

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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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J.D. Salinger from The Catcher in the Rye

It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes.


Crumby. That's something you don't hear much these days. But point taken.

If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did.

Any phonies here? You're up.

I knew it wasn't too important, but it made me sad anyway.

Next up: it is important.

Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls, girls that looked like they'd be bitches if you knew them. It was really nice sightseeing, if you know what I mean. In a way, it was sort of depressing, too, because you kept wondering what the hell would happen to all of them. When they got out of school and college, I mean. You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys. Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never read books. Guys that are very boring— But I have to be careful about that. I mean about calling certain guys bores. I don't understand boring guys. I really don't.

Next up: Boys with...

People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting goddam sick of it.

Of course tons of things actually aren't.

But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody'd written 'fuck you' on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them— all cockeyed naturally— what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it.

Fuck me?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Graham Greene from The Quiet American

It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.


I won't feel proud of you if you won't feel pround of me.

I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around, at the little I would be leaving.

In other words, the more you have to lose, the greater the dread of death. And, for all the rich and famous, how shitty must that feel?

I wondered whether she would consent to sleep with me that night if Pyle never came, but I knew that when I had smoked four pipes I would no longer want her.

Dope!!!

There wasn't any point in being angry with anyone...the offender was too obviously myself.

Still, as we all know too well, not always.

The first dog I ever had was called Prince. I called him that after the Black Prince. You know, the fellow who...
Massacred all the women and children in Limoges.
I don't remember that.
The history books gloss it over.


Of course, they are written by the winners.

Opium makes you quick-witted - perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important.

Now that takes me back...
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Re: Quote of the day

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The Onion

Pence Says Decision To Run For President Came After God Told Him He Could Get 6-Figure Speaking Deal From It


His God would say that.

Target Scales Back Pride Section To Single T-Shirt Saying They’d Do A Threesome With A Girl For Their Boyfriend’s Birthday

Right wing woke let's call it.

Area Man Holding Out Until Next Exit For Better Fast Food Options

Who wouldn't?

Report Finds Tobacco Industry Aware Of Harmful Effects Of Flicking Lit Cigarette Into Giant Trail Of Gasoline For Years

Why does not not shock me?

New Florida Bill Allows Guns To Start Businesses

Why does not not shock me?

Supreme Court Upholds Voting Rights Law As Cover For What Comes Next

Bringing back slavery?
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Re: Quote of the day

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David Foster Wallace from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?


Go ahead, ask me that.

But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation.

Next up: the Fuck You generation.

Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.

If you know what he means.

But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

Fuck it, he concluded, and snuffed it.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

Tell that to the deep state?

When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on.

Unless, of course, it was a lion.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Theodore Kaczynski

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.


Okay, but only until the workers of the world unite.

Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.

Okay, but only until the workers of the world unite.

The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.

Yeah, Mr. Conservative, what about that?!!

It is obvious that leftists are not cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality.

Yeah, Mr. Liberal, what about that?!!

History is made by active, determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and consistent idea of what it really wants.

Well, we don't call them "the masses" for nothing.

When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity, and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.

Well, we don't call it "crony capitalism" for nothing.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Michio Kaku from Physics of the Impossible

It is also possible to carve atomic devices using electron beams. For example, scientists at Cornell University have made the world’s smallest guitar, one that is twenty times smaller than a human hair, carved out of crystalline silicon. It has six strings, each one hundred atoms thick, and the strings can be plucked using an atomic force microscope. This guitar will actually play music, but the frequencies it produces are well above the range of the human ear.


Uh, believe it or not?

In the novel Janus Equation, writer G. Spruill explored one of the harrowing problems with time travel. In this tale a brilliant mathematician whose goal is to discover the secret of time travel meets a strange, beautiful woman, and they become lovers, although he knows nothing about her past. He becomes intrigued about finding out her true identity. Eventually he discovers that she once had plastic surgery to change her features. And that she had a sex change operation. Finally, he discovers that “she” is actually a time traveler from the future, and that “she” is actually himself, but from the future. This means that he made love to himself. And one is left wondering, what would have happened if they had had a child? And if this child went back into the past, to grow up to become the mathematician at the beginning of the story, then is it possible to be your own mother and father and son and daughter?

That ever happen to you?

For example, it takes the entire planet Earth to attract a feather to the floor, but we can counteract Earth’s gravity by lifting the feather with a finger. The action of our finger can counteract the gravity of an entire planet that weighs over six trillion trillion kilograms.

Clearly, as with God, Nature works in mysterious ways.

Embarrassingly enough, at present there is no theory explaining the properties of these high-temperature superconductors. In fact, a Nobel Prize is awaiting the enterprising physicist who can explain how high-temperature superconductors work.

Go for it!

Such thinking is sheer speculation, but the laws of physics allow for the possibility of opening a hole in space by concentrating enough energy at a single point, until we access the space-time foam and wormholes emerge connecting our universe to a baby universe.

Hypothetically for example.

Clearly, invisibility is a property that arises at the atomic level, via Maxwell's equations, and hence would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate using ordinary means. To make Harry Potter invisible, one would have to liquefy him, boil him to create steam, crystallize him, heat him again, and then cool him, all of which would be quite difficult to accomplish, even for a wizard.

Let's run this by J. K. Rowling.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Emil M. Cioran from On the Heights of Despair

...the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.


Pick one:
1] The Big Bang
2] God
3] none of the above


My soul is chaos, how can it be at all?

Pick one:
1] The Big Bang
2] God
3] none of the above


I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction.

Yo, Harry and Magnus and AJ and iwannaplato and Satyr!
Well, among others.


After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.

Indeed, run that by him now.

For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.

Meaning what exactly?

Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.

This bears repeating.
And then some...
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Re: Quote of the day

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Stephen Hawking from A Brief History of Time

But a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System—and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.


Dependng of course on whether or not you included the oort cloud.

In Newton's time it was possible for an educated person to have a grasp of the whole of human knowledge, at least in outline. But since then, the pace of the development of science has made this impossible. Because theories are always being changed to account for new observations, they are never properly digested or simplified so that ordinary people can understand them...

Let alone the ordinary pinheads here.

...even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would break down at the big bang.

Someone run this by God, please.

...theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.

Oh well, so much for the theories bandied about here.

Real gravitons make up what classical physicists would call gravitational waves, which are very weak—and so difficult to detect that they have not yet been observed.

Any day now, right?

...the physicist John Wheeler once calculated that if one took all the heavy water in all the oceans of the world, one could build a hydrogen bomb that would compress matter at the center so much that a black hole would be created. Of course, there would be no one left to observe it.

Like that would stop them.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Jennette McCurdy from I'm Glad My Mom Died

I don’t like knowing people in the context of things. "Oh, that’s the person I work out with. That’s the person I’m in a book club with. That’s the person I did that show with." Because once the context ends, so does the friendship.


Next up: the context here.

I take a longer look at the words on her headstone.
Brave, kind, loyal, sweet, loving, graceful, strong, thoughtful, funny, genuine, hopeful, playful, insightful, and on and on…
Was she, though? Was she any of those things? The words make me angry. I can’t look at them any longer.
Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them?


And whose honesty might that be?
If you get my drift.


I'm becoming an angry person with no tolerance for anyone. I'm aware of this shift and yet have no desire to change it. If anything, I want it. It's armor. It's easier to be angry than to feel the pain underneath it.

Trust me: not my anger.

A pushover is a bad thing to be, but an opinionated pushover is a worse thing to be. A pushover is nice and goes along with it, whatever it is. An opinionated pushover acts nice and goes along with it, but while quietly brooding and resentful. I am an opinionated pushover.

You tell me.

I always forget that trying to reason with the unreasonable is...unreasonable.

That would be me, right?

I feel like the world is divided into two types of people: people who know loss and people who don't.

I lost my way home once.
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Re: Quote of the day

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"Take the long way home" - Supertramp

-Imp
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

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Pessimism...

“Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.” Joyce Carol Oates


Now that's tricky.

"This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.” Raymond Carver

And getting awfuller.

“It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else.” Gillian Flynn

She get's it.

“Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.” Stephen Colbert

Uh, fuck you, Stephen?

“One can only tolerate the absolute idiocy of Man for so long before bringing out the bat.” Dean Hale

And, of course, the equivalent of that here.

"I am blind.
(Silence)
Perhaps he can see into the future.” Samuel Beckett


All the way to November 2024 here.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Vladimir Nabokov from Lolita

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.


Actually, I wouldn't go that far.
Well, not counting all the times here I would go much farther.


I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

Uh, maybe?

You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.

Not counting God, of course.

Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise - a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames - but still a paradise.

Men let's call them.

Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.

Men let's call them.

She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.

This Marat? https://youtu.be/zEysfTMWmSY
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Re: Quote of the day

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Cormac McCarthy from The Passenger

Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.


All jumbled up though as likely as not.

But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.

A few dozen? I'll settle for a handful. And one in particular.

Mercy is in the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.

But then for some like me for those like you not even that.

When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle.

For example, if Trump is reelected.

There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

So much for an omnipotent God, right?

He thought that God’s goodness appeared in strange places. Dont close your eyes.

Next up: God's goodness here.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Carl Sagan from Cosmos

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.


Tell that to God?

Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.

A trade-off let's call it.

Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.

That certainly explains a lot here.

It is said that men may not be the dreams of the gods, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.

And these days, women too. Unless you're a Southern Baptist.

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

Tell that to the assholes who run the world.

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

Tell that to the assholes who run the world.
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Re: Quote of the day

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Stupidity...

"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity." Harlan Ellison


Actually, it's the other way around. Right, Mr. Pinhead?

"You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.” Robert A. Heinlein

Though here it is quite often both.

“We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.” Christopher Hitchens

Let's run that by, well, you know who.

"Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.” Jane Austen

So she came here. And changed her name to, well, you know who.

“Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.” William Faulkner

Next up: squawk, squawk, squawk.

“The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Up in the intellectual clouds especially.
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