The new work, the innovation, is legitimated by the chain of works leading back to an authoritative type. But the chain also needs the new work. It is the new work that selects the chain out of the debris of the past.
— Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, "Anachronic Renaissance," from a reading for VIS392
I don't want you to speak at my funeral. And if you do, I'll never speak to you again.
— Joke Sid heard someone say at a memorial service
Mr. Iger believes that, if Mr. Jobs had lived, Disney and Apple might have merged.
— Maureen Dowd, "The Slow-Burning Success of Disney’s Bob Iger," The New York Times
Do you know the phrase "tragedy is just comedy without the last act?"
— David, in the Yankee Traveler Motel
I feel like if I did model trains I would pick a scale and stick to it.
— David
Boy, that's a good picture. Hey, I'd like a piece of that picture.
— Trump quoted by Jordan Fabian about a Tom Brenner photo of him with money in his back pocket
They don't know how to respond, all they know how to do is appeal.
— Sid*
Just as a murderer's bloody fingerprint on a page says more than the words printed on it.
— Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer"
The heart of the house was the parlor, which Washington turned into his dining room, an eccentric space claiming the odd distinction of having seven doors and one window.
— Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life
Learn from your mistakes, it's simple.
— One Amtrak conductor to another, generously, after the latter had made a mistake
We're really into training the audience.
— Patrick Gabridge
Genome: bought the book; hard to read
— Eric Lander, Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony
On a peanut farm in Asia with no floor.
— Andrew Yang, 3rd Democratic Debate
Things happen by accident, but nothing gets left by accident.
— Emily Eveleth recounting something her husband says
You could research the stuff and use it. You didn't have to know it.
— Sid on his Dictionary of Foreign Quotations by Robert and Mary Collison
Smothered mate.
— Alex, a chess player in Washington Square Park
Washington's contemporaries recognized that compulsive note taking, this itch to record every action, went to the very essence.
— Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life
When Gilbert Stuart painted them a more brilliant blue, he explained that in a hundred years they would fade to the right color.
— Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life
I loved that it was so shit! It was so out of style to collect these nostalgic things but also so in style to have a Damien Hirst and I kept playing with that. It was like alchemy... I was getting into pairs of objects too, I'd bought 2 of everything wherever I could and I used them as pairs in this piece. I love the confidence you get with two shit things, it makes them good. If you make a horrible painting then paint it again and hang both side by side it becomes super hard to dismiss it, or them.
— @damienhirst
Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning.
— Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin