“You always have a tendency to add. But one must be able to subtract too. It’s not enough to integrate, you must also disintegrate. That’s the way life is. That’s philosophy. That’s science. That’s progress, civilization.”
—Eugène Ionesco, The Lesson
(Via.)
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“Statistical knowledge once was rare. It was a property of the minds of great rulers, conquerors, and generals, people who succeeded or failed by the manipulation of large quantities that remained, to them, unimagined because unimaginable: merely accountable quantities of land, treasure, people, soldiers, and workers. This is the sort of knowledge we now call ‘data’ or ‘facts’ or ‘information.’ Or we call it ‘objective knowledge,’ supposedly untainted by personal attachment, but nonetheless available for industrial and commercial exploitation. By means of such knowledge a category assumes dominion over its parts or members. With the coming of industrialism, the great industrialists, like kings and conquerors, become exploiters of statistical knowledge. And finally virtually all of us, in order to participate and survive in their system, have had to agree to their substitution of statistical knowledge for personal knowledge. Virtually all of us now share with the most powerful industrialists their remoteness from actual experience of the actual world. Like them, we participate in an absentee economy, which makes us effectively absent even from our own dwelling places.”
“My mode of life is devised solely for writing, and if there are any changes, then only for the sake of perhaps fitting in better with my writing; for time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.”
(↬ Mason Currey.)
“I do not have and I do not need material things. My material world is extremely small and limited. I own one single suit that I’m wearing right now and in the last 25 years I’ve never had another suit. And the shoes that I’m wearing I’ve been wearing for 3 years and they are my only pair of shoes. I need to replace them because they are starting to come apart. I don’t need 20 pairs of shoes. I have a car that I’ve had for 12 years. It’s fine, I enjoy life and things are very basic. I don’t have social networks in the Internet for example. I don’t even have a cell phone. I’m probably the last to holdout. I just don’t want to be available all the time. I love to connect with people but in a more fundamental way. I never go to parties, but I invite friends and I cook for them.”
“I remember years ago I was walking on the beach and there was a guy walking towards me and he was wearing a T-shirt that said, ‘Question Authority,’ and my immediate reaction was, Who says?”
(Via.)
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“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
—Ecclesiastes 9:11, KJV
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“Something I miss terribly from the ’60s — the most important phrase in the English language was ‘I got hung up.’ Somebody says that they got hung up, it’s unassailable, you know? You don’t go near that. Whoa! I know what that can be like.”
—Alan Arkin in the February 2013 Esquire
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“My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode away ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout.”
—Albert Brooks
(Via.)
“There was an opulent sunset. I was standing under an acacia in bloom and the words ‘shower of gold’ came into my mind, followed by a surge of feeling. I call it greed, but it was more a feeling of wanting a surplus in my life, wanting to have too much of something, for a change. I didn’t want to be a candidate anymore, not for a doctorate or anything else: I wanted to be at the next level, where things would come to me, accrue to me. It was acute.”
—Norman Rush, Mating
(Via.)
“I have observed that many people spend an inordinate amount of their lives devoting obsessive attention to subjects while simultaneously working to demonstrate that they don’t take those subjects at all seriously. Not just that they don’t take them seriously but that they couldn’t possibly. This tends to be expressed in a tone that we typically identify as ironic, but it doesn’t have to be, and the focus on irony misses the essential point. I think that people need a sense of narrative in their life, they need self-belief, they need to feel like their life stands for something. And I genuinely believe that the way a lot of people spend the majority of their time – electronically mediated, participating in a constant digital conversation about whatever has captured the mass attention, and making fun of absolutely everything about it – is just deadening of any sense of purpose or deeper meaning.”
(Via Matt Frost.)
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