If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get off the couch, move.
We live longer / but less precisely / and in shorter sentences / We travel faster, farther, more often, / but bring back slides instead of memories
I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe—but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry—poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs—is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.
Boundaries, after all–of custom, of language, of what is and is not permitted–not only function to keep others out but also keep those inside from expanding.
Democracy does not mean you will never have corrupt politicians. Democracy is what you do when you discover the mayor is stealing the people's cash.- Jan Budaj, one of the organizers of the 1989 Slovakian Velvet Revolution, speaking to the New York Times on current protests in the country.
Well raise another round boys and have another glass be thankful for today knowing it will never last still let's leave the world laughing when our eulogies are read may we all get to heaven before the devil knows we're dead.- Turnpike Troubadours, "Before the Devil Knows We're Dead"
In pursuing the objective to generalize theoretical models we must ask ourselves whether greater detail in formulating the contributing processes is warranted by truncation errors, by sensitivity of the results to detail, by the resulting increase in computational complexity and time, and by ignorance of the way these processes really work.- Joseph Smagorinsky. "General Circulation Experiments with the Primitive Equations: I. The Basic Experiment." Monthly Weather Review, 91.3 (1963): 99–164.
Chance is not simply a matter of choosing, but the result of that which might have happened anyway.- Laszlo Krasznahorkai, from "Downhill on a Forest Road," in The World Goes On
To rule forever, it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call...Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line...through the midst of a People,— to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,— 'tis the first stroke.— All else will follow as if predestined, unto War and Devastation.- Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon
Q: What things bore you?Roberto Bolaño: The empty discourse of the Left. I take for granted the empty discourse of the Right.
In the distance is the gloom of the end of days, when the sun calls home its wandering rays, when all of the iron has gone to rust, and every living thing has turned to dust. There won't be anyone left to float your boat, they all went to high ground while their vessels still float, they scream God's will but you know it's a lie, by your own book it says by fire next time; the golden eggs cracked open, and there was nothing inside. Cast all dispersions build a levee of lies. I can see it comin': bite down on the leather, and close your eyes, there's nothin' to be done that can turn the tide. The money in your eyes has left you blind. You'll be the one drownin' when it's swimmin' time
If I had to hold up the most heavily fortified bank in America, I'd take a gang of poets. The attempt would probably end in disaster, but it would be beautiful.- Roberto Bolaño, in "THE BEST GANG," (January 1999 - April 2000), Between Parenthesis
We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps but an expression of a poetry that was lost.- Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space
We all know nationalist cultures are boring.- Dany Laferriere is amazing in this Paris Review interview.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Well, it's Ninth and HennepinAll the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes
And the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky
Like a tarp thrown all over this
And the broken umbrellas like dead birds
And the steam comes out of the grill like the whole goddamn town’s ready to blow
And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos
And everyone is behaving like dogs
And the horses are coming down Violin Road and Dutch is dead on his feet
And all the rooms they smell like diesel
And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here
And I’m lost in the window, and I hide in the stairway
And I hang in the curtain, and I sleep in your hat
And no one brings anything small into a bar around here
They all started out with bad directions
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear
One for every year he’s away, she said
Such a crumbling beauty
Ah, there’s nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won’t fix
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse
With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific going by
And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
Till you’re full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen
And I’ve seen it all
I’ve seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train
...until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned...until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation...until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes...until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race...until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.
- Halie Selassie, in an address to the United Nations, 1963.
I thought we could all use the reminder.
What if this eclipse somehow just didn’t happen? It would be even more terrifying for us than the eclipse was to people a thousand years ago. Suddenly, some very hard questions would need to be asked. Unrest; scientists, facing an incredulous public, desperately search for the moon, finally discovering that 60 years ago a researcher (the fourth of five listed authors of a widely-cited paper on the computer modeling of lunar orbital mechanics) incorrectly translated a punch-card into COBOL, because the process is mind-numbing, nothing like the life of the astronaut he wants to be, but anyway, in his distraction, he introduced a small, but compounding error. In the mean time we’ve burned down all the universities for nothing, all the scientists are in hiding, we’re all chain smoking and using computers to bludgeon livestock. The pope’s army is marching on the space station, and the caliph’s call echoes through Valles Marineris...
It's a turn-around jump shot it's everybody jump start it's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts medicine is magical and magical is art think of the Boy in the Bubble and the baby with the baboon heart.- Paul Simon, "The Boy in the Bubble" Graceland
We nuh concern with who hawking / When dem spit can't reach where we walking.- Protoje, "Protection"
The world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish.- David Foster Wallace, This is Water (pdf)
Just reading that you can imagine a little bit of how hard it must have been for Wallace to operate day in and day out with an awareness of the world this raw and difficult and intimate. I never met him, but miss this man sooooooo much.
You should distrust any language that uses the same word for libre and gratis.- Laia Jufresa, Umami
yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore...where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire...- Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
All "direct" persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity.- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground
(Quick tip: want to read all kinds of great classic lit eBooks for free? Head over to Project Gutenberg.)
I'm hangin' out with the street people / They've got it down / Hangin' out with the street people / Driftin' from town to town / Who's gonna work, make the economy grow / If we all hang out in the street / Well I don't know, and I don't care / Just as long as it ain't me- Bobby Charles, "Street People" 1972.