Weddings are covert funerals. The bereaved bury sexual and personal liberty and are recompensed with champagne and domestic appliances.
—Alain de Botton
Categories: quotes
Tagged: Alain de Botton
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock – that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things. They will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view. Get out of the way with your cobwebs; wash your windows, I say!
—Henry David Thoreau, “Life Without Principle” (1863)
Categories: quotes
Tagged: Henry David Thoreau
I see too many dudes every day who have no idea what they’re doing: guys who have no idea how to dress, how to drive, how to lift weights, how to eat/drink, how to sit, how to listen, how to speak, how to spell, how to write, how to think for themselves, or how to even live their lives. I very, very rarely meet a fellow gentleman and then later think to myself, “He knows what he’s doing.” That sucks. Now, I don’t claim to know what I’m doing most of the time, but I’m trying. Please try with me.
No kidding.
(Via.)
Categories: masculinity · quotes · style
I have met a number of philosophers. They were real philosophers. Their minds were wonderful minds. But they did not take baths, and they did not change their socks and it almost turned one’s stomach to sit at table with them.
—Jack London, 1915
Categories: philosophy · quotes
Tagged: Jack London
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.
(Via.)
Categories: books · quotes · reading · writing
Tagged: libraries, Ray Bradbury
To say the 1980s rivalry between the Celtics and the Lakers represents America’s racial anguish is actually a short-sighted understatement. As I have grown older, it’s become clear that the Lakers-Celtics rivalry represents absolutely everything: race, religion, politics, mathematics, the reason I’m still not married, the Challenger explosion, Man vs. Beast, and everything else. There is no relationship that isn’t a Celtics-Lakers relationship. It emerges from nothingness to design nature, just as Gerald Henderson emerged from nothingness to steal James Worthy’s errant inbound pass in game two of the 1983 finals. Do you realize that the distance between Henderson and Worthy at the start of that play – and the distance between them at the point of interception – works out to a ratio of 1.618, the same digits of Leonardo da Vinci’s so called “golden ratio” that inexplicably explains the mathematical construction of the universe? Do not act surprised. It would be more surprising if the ratio did not.
—Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
The Lakers and Celtics meet in the NBA Finals for the twelfth time starting tonight.
Categories: quotes · sports
Tagged: Celtics, Chuck Klosterman, Lakers, NBA
It is not easy … to wait. Waiting is what the hunter does, and the poet and the slugger. He waits for the moment of inevitability and fate and then he swings, or shoots, or takes up the pen to put down a line. They don’t teach us to wait in America; they teach us to grab. But waiting is what we do when we are looking for something beautiful, when we are looking for an end to our sorrow. Nothing is infinite in life, not even sorrow. You just have to wait.
Categories: quotes
In Hamburg in 1834, a handsome young army officer named Baron von Trautmansdorf challenged a fellow officer, Baron von Ropp, to a duel. The precipitating offense was a poem that von Ropp had written and circulated among his friends about von Trautmansdorf’s moustace, stating that it was thin and floppy and hinting that it might not be the only part of his physique to which those adjectives could be applied. The feud between the barons had originated in their shared passion for the same woman, Countess Lodoiska, the grey-green-eyed widow of a Polish general. Unable to resolve their differences amicably, the two men met in a field in a Hamburg suburb early on a March morning. Both were carrying swords; both were still short of their thirtieth birthdays; both would die in the ensuing fight.
—Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
Categories: masculinity · quotes
The lunch he prepared for us was perfect: homemade vegetable soup, tuna-salad sandwiches on chunks of suspiciously healthy-looking bread, and a dessert of berries, followed by coffee. He doesn’t drink, except on Friday nights, when he tends to have fun in biker bars. Mr. Waters’s life is otherwise disciplined. He gets up at 6 a.m. and is usually in bed by 10 p.m. or so: “I’m a Swiss person trapped in an American’s body. I like a very orderly life.”
He’s a meticulous man, too. His library of some 8,000 books is carefully catalogued. He’s a bookworm. “Nothing is more important than an unread library,” he says. Formerly a heavy smoker, he showed me the record he carries of the number of days since he quit. He was on to Day 2,634.
—John Heilpern, “Uncharted Waters,” Vanity Fair, June 2010.
Categories: books · quotes · smoking · work
Tagged: John Waters
