Quotes

[Faust]

"He'd paid the full price for art, only he hadn't made any. He'd suffered all the old-fashioned artistic sufferings - isolation, poverty, despair, mental and physical obstruction - and nobody knew or cared. And though nobody knowing or caring was another form of artistic suffering, in his case it had no artistic meaning. He was just someone who had grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions."

Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater

[interest1]

You can always tell a real friend:
when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.

– Laurence J. Peter

[Faust]

There are nasty types even among whores.

Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater

[Faust]

They just keep piling on as I am enjoying Sabbath's Theater. The protagonist, contemplating suicide:

"Mishima. Rothko. Hemingway. Berryman. Koestler. Pavese. Kosinski. Ashile Gorky. Primo Levi. Hart Crane. Walter Benjamin. Peerless bunch. Nothing dishonorable signing on there. Faulkner as good as killed himself with booze. As did Ava Gardner. Blessed Ava. Wasn't much about men could astonish Ava. Elegance and filth, immaculately intertwined. Dead at sixty-two, two years younger than me. Ava, Yvonne de Carlo - those are role models! Fuck the laudable ideologies. Shallow, shallow, shallow! Enough reading and rereading A Room of One's Own - get yourself The Collected work of Ava Gardner. A tweaking and fingering lesbian virgin, V. Woolf, erotic life one part prurience, nine parts fear - an overbred English parody of a borzoi, effortlessly superior, as only the English can be, to all her inferiors, who never took her clothes off in her life. But a suicide, remember. The list grows more inspiring by the year."

- Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater

[interest1]

Screenshot from an eBay seller I recently purchased from.
Something about the wording in their terms of sale made me feel inexplicably dirty.

[Faust]

/\ Yes, but as you know coming together is not that easy.

[Faust]

"You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever."

-Philip Roth, Sabbath's Theater

[apathy!]

excerpt from short Vladimir Nabokov essay:

I presume there exists readers who find titillating the display of mural words in those hopelessly banal and enormous novels which are typed out by the thumbs of tense mediocrities and called "powerful" and "stark" by the reviewing hack. There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reador nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no morals in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected, with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

[Faust]

Well, regardless of what Nabokov says, while the novel is not didactic, moral issues are blatantly present in Lolita. Other things, too, obviously (including aesthetic bliss), but you can't get around morals there. We can get into the whole whether writer or reader controls the interpretation/meaning of the text debate again - but then BSR will start quoting Barthes and take all the fun out of it!!!*

*just kidding!

[apathy!]

I think he must have been very frustrated at the public reception of the book at the time, which I imagine to be something along the lines of "pedophile needs to get punished or it's a bad story" or, "gripping exploration of pedophilia".


I.e. the public focusing on an aspect of the novel he thought to be unimportant.

[interest1]

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

–George Carlin

[Macky]

"The day you stop striving for excellence is the day you begin basking in mediocrity." - Me around 8th grade / beginning of high school. I went through a strange phase where I grew up quite fast (more so mentally than physically lol) and started thinking of quotes that I thought would help motivate me throughout my years. That quote is one that has stuck with me the longest. Once in a while, I'll think of something and jot it down on a piece of paper or make a note on my iPhone.

[pilgrim]

Love is shown more in deeds than in words.

[interest1]

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

― Oscar Wilde

[daou0782]

“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.”
― Lao Tzu