We nuh concern with who hawking / When dem spit can't reach where we walking.

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.

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.

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...

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.

(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

History, really, is fiction - not because it is made up of invented facts, for the facts are real, but because in the organization of those facts there is much fiction.

It is the storyteller... who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that survivors must have — otherwise surviving would have no meaning... This is very, very important... Memory is necessary if surviving is going to be more than just a technical thing.

What prophecy actually is is not that you actually know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It's that you know and feel something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe articulate it in a hint — a concrete way that they can pick up on in a hundred years.

Is a sermon most off putting when delivered from the pulpit of a cathedral or a street corner?

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

• Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”

There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

Communication is, precisely, the avoidance of sincerity in order to reach agreement.

Places and people are like things: both made of memories and meaningful to us in the same way: we construct ourselves in our conversations with them.

We can prevent reading: but in the decree that forbids reading there will still be read something of the truth that we would wish never to be read

But what if everything that is to happen has already happened, and only the consequences are playing themselves out?

Poets are set against the world because they cannot accept that what there seems to be is all there is.

Is the engineer an artist? Good question. My favorite quote:

It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.

• via Nautilus

Every Western ideology promises some ultimate goal — a happy, a just, or a peaceful society. I don't believe in that. We are things in flux. It may be that the stone always slides away from us and must be rolled back up again, but it's something we must do; the stone belongs to us.

One should not fear the rebel.  One should not be afraid of becoming a rebel himself.  To do something new has always been called rebellion...What is to be feared is the death of the spirit.  To believe only what one is taught to believe, to say only what one is taught to say, to do only what one is asked to do, to find security in life by existing formally like a doll poured from a model, to lose completely the idea of self confidence in ones independence and the belief in self-improvement - this is death of the spirit.  To live is to rebel.

I smile to keep from howling, I sing so I won't pray or curse.

I think good narrative comes from observing the world and what happens inside yourself. The opportunity to move in and out of two realities, your inner world and the world outside of you, is what I find fascinating about writing. If you just want to tell stories, there are other ways, other media, to do so.

I personally feel that no one gives a shit about my books — maybe I'm just a pessimist — and that idea feels horrible and refreshing at the same time. I feel ignored and doomed to anonymity, but free to do whatever I want within the sacred space of literature. I can very easily forget about the world, which has forgotten about me since the beginning, and write my stuff to be at peace and to better understand myself and my surroundings, without trying to please anyone.

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.

I want to be around people that do things. I don’t want to be around people anymore that judge or talk about what people do. I want to be around people that dream and support and do things.