Monday, December 4, 2023
It is a system which is a complete and purposed jumble—a course which begins nowhere, follows no specified route, and can never reach an end while I am alive.
— Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Ham, Egg & Cheese on a Cinnamon Crunch Bagel
— NEW Panera item at Salt Lake City International airport
Saturday, December 2, 2023
An autobiography is always two things: it is an absolute lie and it is an absolute truth. The author of it furnishes the lie, the reader of it furnishes the truth—that is he gets at the truth by insight.
— Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1
Friday, December 1, 2023
You ever had Christopher Elbow Chocolates?
— Henry Becker when I told him I was from Overland Park
Thursday, November 30, 2023
That's what I thought.
— Woman (who prefaced by telling me she was LDS) after my talk once she heard my answer of "I think we just end" to her question of "what do you think happens after we die?," she also asked a great question during the Q&A about whether I though all my work was about trying to escape death (potentially paraphrased)
Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Where they have left no sign that they have existed—a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever. Then another myriad takes their place and copies all they did and goes along the same profitless road and vanishes as they vanished—to make room for another and another and a million other myriads to follow.
— Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Now one must not imagine that because it has taken all day Tuesday to write up the autobiographical matter of Monday, there will be nothing to write on Wednesday. No, there will be just as much to write on Wednesday as Monday had furnished for Tuesday... Therefore a full autobiography has never been written, and it never will be.
— Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1
Monday, November 27, 2023
What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant waste of water—and they are so trifling a part of his bulk, a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden—it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil and never rest night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written and cannot be written. Every day would make a whole book of eighty thousand words—three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
— Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1
Sunday, November 26, 2023
I don't want my Wikipedia page to be about that.
— Nicolas Cage, Dream Scenario
Saturday, November 25, 2023
Whereas the side-excursions are the life of our life-voyage, and should be, also, of its history.
— Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1
Friday, November 24, 2023
And I hope, that these images have some depth.
— Presenter notes
Thursday, November 23, 2023
If you don't listen to them, don't tell them no, just do what you want to do.
— Sid on the people who help him these days
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Commissioned USPS mailbox for private residence, 2023
— @serbanserban
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
It cleans the air for up to 6 feet.
— Woman on Amtrak telling her seatmate about her expensive anti-COVID machine that looked like a fake smoke detector
Monday, November 20, 2023
The man has yet to be born who could write the truth about himself.
— Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1
Sunday, November 19, 2023
There is one intentionally funny sentence. Writing about livestock auctioneers, he says, “I always wanted to direct a ‘Hamlet’ and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers; I wanted the performance to come in at under 14 minutes.”
— Dwight Garner, "The Cosmic, Outrageous, Ecstatic Truths of Werner Herzog," The New York Times
Saturday, November 18, 2023
Why don't you go ask everyone on line what time it is.
— Lily pointing towards people in line for "Planet OMEGA" exhibition
Friday, November 17, 2023
There's nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man's every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you.
— Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Thursday, November 16, 2023
Jean Baudrillard once wrote, "The magic of photography is that it is the object which does all the work," It was a mild provocation. It undermines the photographer as sole author and recognized just how much "work" is contributed by what, or who, is in front of the camera. Photography requires the existence of, and contribution of, something outside of itself, so it can never be anything other than collaborative in the wider sense.
— David Campany, Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, via @davidcampany
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Meaning is a scrap among other scraps, though stickier. Meaning is so much better than nothing, in that it defines “nothing” as everything that meaning is not. Meaning prevents nothing from being only nothing. The “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” Wallace Stevens noticed. The same nothing, but a difference of attitude.
— Peter Schjeldahl, "The Art of Dying," The New Yorker
