Quotes

[kuugaia]

^ Loving a lot of your quotes dude. Keep at it.

[Haven]

"Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."

Friedrich Nietzsche

[Haven]

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

passionné nez pasionném je
je t’ai je t’aime je
je je jet je t’ai jetez
je t’aime passionném t’aime.

- Gherasim Luca Passionnément(1973)

[Edward B]

"The world is a mirror showing us what is going on within.."

[MJRH]

[I studied maps ...] not in geography but in paintings.

- Eugène Fromentin Un été dans le Sahara(1857)

You can't explain symbols beyond a certain depth; after that, you have to live by them in order to understand them. They sidetrack the conceptual field and become part of the blood beat. In this domain one can really say "I know" without the onus of proof, and in default of reason.
-Lawrence Durrell, Avignon Quincunx

[Acéphale]

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction

- Walter Benjamin

[trentk]

"Philosophers are vivisectors, surgeons who have evaded the Hippocratic moderation. They have the precise and reptilian intelligence shared by all those who experiment with living things. Perhaps there is nothing quite as deeply frozen as the sentiment of a true philosopher, for it is necessary to be quite dispassionate if one is to find things theoretically intriguing. Strong thought is always experimentation in the severe style; ‘cut, then watch’. It is not easy to be the friend—or the body—of a philosopher"
- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

"There is a usual tendency to oppose honest openness and evasive obliqueness, but all powerful intellectual life lies somewhere between these two poles, and there’s no getting around the fact that thinking is more like witchcraft than like robotic calculation. This notion comes to me not from Heidegger, Whitehead, or Latour, but from Plato, and it is time for Plato to be revived."
- Graham Harman

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

Some kind of solitude
with no swan and no pier
reflects its desuetude
in my gaze withdrawn here

from the vain pomp too high
for anyone to hold
mottling many a sky
with sunset's varied gold

but languorously skirt
like cast-off drapery
of white some fleeting bird
if nearby joyously

your naked bliss should plumb
the wave that you become

- Stéphane Mallarmé Little Ditty I(1894)

[Acéphale]

The fools of the world have been those who have established religions, ceremonies, laws, faith, rule of life. The greatest asses of the world are those who, lacking all understanding and instruction, and void of all civil life and custom, rot in perpetual pedantry; those who by the grace of heaven would reform obscure and corrupted faith, salve the cruelties of perverted religion and remove abuse of superstitions, mending the rents in their vesture. It is not they who indulge impious curiosity or who are ever seeking the secrets of nature, and reckoning the courses of the stars. Observe whether they have been busy with the secret causes of things, or if they have condoned the destruction of kingdoms, the dispersion of peoples, fires, blood, ruin or extermination; whether they seek the destruction of the whole world that it may belong to them: in order that the poor soul may be saved, that an edifice may be raised in heaven, that treasure may be laid up in that blessed land, caring naught for fame, profit or glory in this frail and uncertain life, but only for that other most certain and eternal life.

- Giordano Bruno

[Faust]

A Nietzsche inspiration?

[interest1]

The more intelligent, the less sane. . . -Orwell

[BeauIXI]

"I write with a view to show that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply."

William Wordsworth

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

[fragmentation] is indispensable if one does not
want to fall into representation. ... Isolate the parts.
Make them independent as a way of giving them
new dependence.

- Robert Bresson Notes On Cinematography(1975)

[Faust]

"And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters' unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art-form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearances: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to other's ridicule by betraying passe expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people becomes judges; the crime is naivete. Th well-trained viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier. Joe B's exhaustive TV-training in how to worry about how he might come across, seem to watching eyes, makes genuine human encounters even scarier. But televisual irony has the solution: further viewing begins to seem almost like required research, lessons in the blank, bored, too-wise expression that Joe must learn how to wear for tomorrow's excruciating ride on the brightly lit subway, where crowds of blank, bored-looking people have little to look at but each other.

What does TV's institutionalization of hip irony have to do with U.S. fiction? Well, for one thing, American literary fiction tends to be about U.S. culture and the people who inhabit it. Culture-wise, shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood jaded weltshmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive? Can we deny connections between an unprecedentedly powerful consensual medium that suggests no real difference between image and substance, on one hand, and stuff like the rise of Teflon presidencies, the establishment of nationwide tanning and liposuction industries, the popularity of "Vogueing" to a cynical synthesized command to "Strike a Pose"? Or, in contemporary art, that televisual disdain for "hypocritical" retrovalues like originality, depth, and integrity has no truck with those recombinant "appropriation" styles of art and architecture in which "pat becomes pastiche," or with the repetitive solmization of a Glass or a Reich, or with the self-conscious catatonia of a platoon or Raymond Carver wannabes?

In fact, the numb blank bored demeanor - what one friend calls the "girl-who's-dancing-with-you-but-would-obviusly-rather-be-dancing-with-somebody-else" expression - that has become my generation's version of cool is all about TV." "Television," after all, literally means "seeing far"; and our six hours daily no only helps us feel upclose and personal at like the Pan-Am Games or Operation Desert Shield but also, inversely, trains us to relate to real live personal up-close stuff the same way we related to the distant and exotic, as if separated from us by physics and glass, extant only as performance, awaiting our cool review. indifference is actually just the '90's version of frugality US young people' wooed several gorgeous hours a day for nothing bout attention, we regard that attention as our chief commodity, our social capital, and we are loath to fritter it. In the same regard, see that in 1990, flatness, numbness, and cynicism in one's demeanor are clear ways to transmit the televisual attitude of stand-out-transcendence - flatness and numbness transcend sentimentality, and cynicism announces that one knows the score, was last naive about something at maybe like age four."

David Foster Wallace - "E Unibus Pluram"