Sunday, December 29, 2013
Was a kind of grand experiment: novel and momentous, sometimes heady, other times unsettling, but unlikely to be repeated.
— Michael Barbaro and Kitty Bennett, “Cost of Being Mayor? $650 Million, if He’s Rich,” The New York Times
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Of course my history goes back a lot farther than yours.
— Dr. Charles “Chic” Shaver
Friday, December 27, 2013
I’m a fuckin Viet Cong!
— Irving Rosenfeld, American Hustle
Thursday, December 26, 2013
These may be, in the present phase of American civilization, distinctions without a meaningful difference behind them.
— A. O. Scott, “When Greed Was Good (and Fun),” The New York Times
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
WWII’s not winning itself.
—
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
You’ve got cucumbers on your eyes.
— First Aid Kit, “When I Grow Up”
Monday, December 23, 2013
Even if we knew where he was every minute of his waking life, would that tell us who he is?
— Errol Morris, Believing Is Seeing
Sunday, December 22, 2013
I once tried to come up with a definition of art. Always a risky enterprise. But the best I could come up with was: create an arbitrary set of rules, and then follow them slavishly.
— Errol Morris, Believing Is Seeing
Saturday, December 21, 2013
The snails, oddly enough, made me feel connected to history.
— Errol Morris, Believing Is Seeing
Friday, December 20, 2013
It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problem, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is not easy. Nature works from reference, even in her destructions (species go down with a crash). But breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all that) then he, if he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size.
— Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”
Thursday, December 19, 2013
In everyday situations, I will simply assume that doing what is right is in my interests; and once I have decided what is right, I will go ahead and do it, without thinking about further reasons for doing what is right.
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
I know more than I need to.
— GHB
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Y'all are amateurs. I can tell.
— Ms. Pat
Monday, December 16, 2013
If you go north on the earth, you eventually go south, but if you go west, you never stop going west.
— Akshay
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Cold be heart and hand and bone.
— Gollum, Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Alpha, step.
Omega, step.
Kappa, step.
Sigma, step.
— Kanye West, “School Spirit”
Friday, December 13, 2013
Like Jonny Quest and Hadji!
— Myron, Jingle All The Way
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Pretty freakin cool.
— John Hunter
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
And that is a profound difference between the sciences and the arts.
— Alan Lightman, “Yellow Fluff and Other Curious Encounters,” Radiolab
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Art is a proposition.
— Joe Scanlan
