Going To Maine's profile (website)
Info
Name: Going To Maine, of course
Joined: January 8, 2013
About
What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.
If you’re suffering from severe depression or black thoughts, there is help on the MeFi Wiki. It’s not a silver bullet, but nothing is.
Since clicking a link can be difficult, here is LobsterMitten’s summary of AskMe depression advice (lightly formatted/edited):
(“Move a muscle, change a thought” isn’t always true, but it can be.)
If you’re just feeling a bit down, perhaps consider Too-Ticky’s “list of ten things that give me satisfaction”:
Maybe one can give you satisfaction as well.
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Read the guidelines and try to think about them before commenting. If you see a comment that seems gross, it might well violate them.
If you want to find other MeFites based on the social networks/apps that they’ve listed in their profile, use the Social Explorer! It’s a great little piece of the site that’s tucked away where no one can find it.
If you want to export your comments, you can do that here.
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Long time lurker, first time username holder! I chose this username because I very much like The Mountain Goats’ song of the same title. If you’re curious about the band, I heartily endorse this free recording of the 2007 ZOOP concert. ZOOP was a fundraiser for Farm Sanctuary’s shelter in Watkins Glen, NY. It’s dear to the heart of lead singer / often-sole-member John Darnielle, and the two nights of shows have a joyous, campfire sing-along vibe to them.
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I’ve made several posts to the blue but my first is my favorite. My ninth got my favorite responses. My twenty-seventh is my most embarrassing; avoid using spicy pull quotes when making an FPP about something you care about. Instead of sparking an interesting discussion about a controversial figure, you’ll just sow a bunch of discord.
Relative to that last point: dropping a bunch of knowledge on someone who hasn’t asked for it and may well disagree with it -especially if it's highly subjective knowledge or information that you consider so fundamental that its wisdom is self-evident- is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from trolling.
This isn’t to say that trolling or snark are necessarily bad things - people engage in both on the site when they want to drag an idea that they disagree with, and are perhaps an important part of keeping a community sassy. But trolling when you think you’re helping is awful.
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My first AskMe question was about finding a copy of the old Sleater-Kinney “live vault” fan recordings of shows . If you’re curious about the live vault, shoot me a MeMail.
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I love a good quote. These used to live on a different site, but many perished during a redesign. The remainder now live here, along with some new friends. While once ordered chronologically according to my discovering them, they’ve since been sort of arranged by them and type. Sort of. (And yes, I’m counting poems as quotes. If you don’t want to count poems as quotes, please make your own list.)
——
“I wish the rent
was heaven sent”
—Langston Hughes, Little Lyric (of Great Importance)
——
“You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men”
—Barbara Kruger, Untitled (You Construct Intricate Rituals), 1981.
——
“I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.”
— Lloyd Dobbler, as written by Cameron Crowe in Say Anything….
——
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
— Walt Whitman, from verse 51 of Song of Myself
——
“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on Earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
— Eugene V. Debs, from his statement to the Federal Court in Cleveland, 1918
——
“What happened to him in the woods, Knight claimed, was inexplicable. But he agreed to set aside his fear of phony wisdom and koans and give it a try. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can’t dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here’s the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.’”
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger In The Woods
——
“It is important that you recognize that there is no experience that comes into your life that is below your dignity”
— an epigram at the start of Walking Through Clear Water In A Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller, and credited to “Dr. Peebles, a nineteenth century Scottish doctor. This is most likely the spiritualist and quack James Martin Peebles.
——
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
— C.S. Lewis, from “On Three Ways Of Writing For Children”
——
“The prayers of both [North and South] could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
— Abraham Lincoln, second inaugural address
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“I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster. It can never be rolled back, or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction.”
— Nick Cave, responding to a fan asking him about a song ChatGPT wrote aping his style.
——
“The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.”
— Umberto Eco, Reflections on The Name of the Rose; trans. William Weaver, London: Minerva, 1994, pp. 67-68. (Citation and quote taken from here, but I believe it may be in a post-script attached to various editions of The Name of the Rose itself.)
——
“The suicide doesn’t go alone, he takes everybody with him”
— William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf (as quoted by Joan Wickersham in The Suicide Index
——
“I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his “Radio Address on the Election of Liberals” on November 4, 1938. (As quoted by Umberto Eco in his essay “Ur-Fascism”, published in The New York Review Of Books in the June 22, 1995 issue.)
——
“If I could return to that job interview from more than three years ago, to that moment when I was asked about my responsibility as a creative-nonfiction writer in the post-truth world, I know what I would say now: Our allegiance as nonfiction writers is not so much to truth as it is to honesty. Because truth can be spoken into a void, while honesty implies an audience, a reader, real people to whom you commit to tell your story as accurately and truthfully as you can so that they can then differentiate for themselves the facts from the lies, the truth from the fiction.”
— Sarah Viren, “The Accusations Were Lies. But Could We Prove It?”
——
“One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly afterwards the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female Voice said YES?
‘O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!’
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON'T SOUND WELL.
‘I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.’
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
‘But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it.’
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left The Polyfather stranded alone with his species.”
— Gregory Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley, The Principia Discordia 38
——
“Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.”
— Maggie Smith, “Good Bones”
——
“Consider this clipping from the New York Times, dated April 15, 1986. At the top of the page is a fourteen-inch story about Desmond Tutu’s election as Archbishop of Capetown, and thus head of South Africa’s Anglican Church. It is an elegant piece of writing, intended to evoke a cathedral mood, a reverent silence in which one might hear stirring the most noble aspects of the human spirit, unquestionable in its thirst for freedom and justice…
Beneath the Tutu story is a minute headline reading, ‘Eleven Die in Night of Violence’, and a squib of copy summarizing the government’s overnight ‘unrest report.’ … And beneath that, unheralded by any headline, are two cryptic little sentences about the discovery, in a place called Sekhukuniland, of something horrible beyond comprehesion: the remains of thirty-two African women, hurled alive into pits of flame.. This was the worst mass murder in South African history, and it took place in a context that The Times clearly could not bring itself to explain. The seventy-six black youths arrested in connection with the massacre were all members or supporters of the UDF - the supposedly non-violent movement championed by the Nobel Peace Laureate at the head of the page. Th thirty-two victims were suspected of using sorcery to retard the freedom struggle and were incinerated in the name of fundamental change.”
— Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart
It feels strange to include an ellipsis to a quote, but I feel obliged. The complicated history of South Africa and the end of apartheid has been flattened in the American imagination (including my own) despite being incredibly recent. What parts of our own pasts are we unknowingly simplifying and smoothing over?
——
“Down South they don’t care how close I am as long as I don’t get too big, and up North they don’t care how big I am as long as I don’t get too close.”
— Dick Gregory (I’m unclear on the specific source of the quote in Gregory’s writings or performances.)
——
“Me sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.”
— @screaminbutcalm (The Golden Sir) (A solid riff on Galatians 6:7)
——
“My son… showed me his favorite all-Mormon sketch comedy troupe. They had all met and started performing comedy at Brigham Young University, but they stayed together after graduation and were now putting out two videos a week for their two million Youtube subscribers. They were wildly popular, and like all wildly popular things these days, no one had ever heard of them.”
— John Hodgman, Medallion Status
——
“A freckled and frivolous cake there was
That sailed upon a pointless sea,
Or any lugubrious lake there was
In a manner emphatic and free.
How jointlessly, and how jointlessly
The frivolous cake sailed by
On the waves of the ocean that pointlessly
Threw fish to the lilac sky.
Oh, plenty and plenty of hake there was
Of a glory beyond compare,
And every conceivable make there was
Was tossed through the lilac air.
Up the smooth billows and over the crests
Of the cumbersome combers flew
The frivolous cake with a knife in the wake
Of herself and her curranty crew.
Like a swordfish grim it would bounce and skim
(This dinner knife fierce and blue) ,
And the frivolous cake was filled to the brim
With the fun of her curranty crew.
Oh, plenty and plenty of hake there was
Of a glory beyond compare -
And every conceivable make there was
Was tossed through the lilac air.
Around the shores of the Elegant Isles
Where the cat-fish bask and purr
And lick their paws with adhesive smiles
And wriggle their fins of fur,
They fly and fly 'neath the lilac sky -
The frivolous cake, and the knife
Who winketh his glamorous indigo eye
In the wake of his future wife.
The crumbs blow free down the pointless sea
To the beat of a cakey heart
And the sensitive steel of the knife can feel
That love is a race apart
In the speed of the lingering light are blown
The crumbs to the hake above,
And the tropical air vibrates to the drone
Of a cake in the throes of love.”
— Mervyn Peak, “The Frivolous Cake”. This poem is embedded in his book Titus Groan. (A lino cut illustration of the poem.)
——
“JIMMY DELL: I think you'll find that if what you've done for them is as valuable as you say it is, if they are indebted to you morally but not legally, my experience is they will give you nothing, and they will begin to act cruelly toward you.
JOE ROSS: Why?
JIMMY DELL: To suppress their guilt.”
— David Mamet, The Spanish Prisoner. (Mamet is a bit of a controversial figure these days, but it’s a good line.)
——
“Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”
— Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
——
”Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
— William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
——
“Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.”
— Seamus Heaney, “Anything Can Happen (after Horace, Odes, I, 34.)”
——
“i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what I love
and i leave to forgive me”
— Lucille Clifton, in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (1969 - 1980)
——
“CECIL GRAHAM: What is a cynic?
LORD DARLINGTON: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
CECIL GRAHAM: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”
— Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan
“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.
The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.
We cannot go on living like this.”
— Tony Judt, the introduction to Ill Fares The Land.
——
“I left the store with [the batik sarong] on. For the next two years, I wore it constantly. I wore it to parties, hiking in the mountains and ambling down city streets. I knew it was only a piece of clothing, but it felt like a step away from my past and toward something unfamiliar. I grew my hair long, tied it in braids, adorned it with beads and feathers. I looked as cartoonish as you’re probably imagining, but that was the point. It came as a revelation that you could walk through town, barefoot and shirtless in a wraparound skirt, with silver crosses dangling from pierced nipples, with Byzantine tattoos, with your beads and feathers swaying like a headdress, and no one even shrugged. I knew that my cousin would have laughed if he’d seen me. A year earlier, I would have laughed at myself.”
— Wil S. Hylton, “My Cousin Was My Hero, Until He Tried To Kill Me”. (The New York Times, May 8, 2019)
——
“Lighght”
— Aram Saroyan (Saroyan on his poem in Mother Jones)
——
“WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS HEALED? WHO IS HOUSED? WHO SPEAKS? WHO IS SILENCED? WHO SALUTES LONGEST? WHO PRAYS LOUDEST? WHO DIES FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST? | LOOK FOR THE MOMENT WHEN PRIDE BECOMES CONTEMPT”
—Barbara Kruger Untitled (Questions), 1991. (A variant of the original, currently installed at MOCA in Los Angeles.)
——
“The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out”
—Nael, age 6, “The Tiger”, printed in They’re Singing a Song in Their Rocket (A comic of the poem.)
——
“The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.”
— Philip Larkin, “The Mower”
——
“National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals, a necessary condition for self-improvement.”
— Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country. (As quoted by Stephen Metcalf in The New Yorker: “Richard Rorty’s Philosophical Argument for National Pride”.)
——
“I’m scrambling an egg for my daughter.
“Why are you always whistling?” she asks.
“Because I’m happy.”
And it’s true,
Though it stuns me to say it aloud;
There was a time when I wouldn’t
Have seen it as my future.
It’s partly a matter
Of who is there to eat the egg:
The self fallen out of love with itself
Through the tedium of familiarity,
Or this little self,
So curious, so hungry,
Who emerged from the woman I love,
A woman who loves me in a way
I’ve come to think I deserve,
Now that it arrives from outside me.
Everything changes, we’re told,
And now the changes are everywhere:
The house with its morning light
That fills me like a revelation,
The yard with its trees
That cast a bit more shade each summer,
The love of a woman
That both is and isn’t confounding,
And the love
Of this clamor of questions at my waist.
Clamor of questions,
You clamor of answers,
Here’s your egg.”
— C.G.Hanzlicek, “Egg”
——
“I guess I don’t really like solitude. The fun is hammering bits of it out of a crowded life.”
— Robert Lowell, from a letter to Elizabeth Bishop
——
“I wanted to make something. I wanted to finish my own sentences.”
— Louise Glück, as quoted by Sarah Ruhl
——
“…and finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses.”
— Sarah Ruhl, “On Interruptions” in100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write
——
“Politics is the art of the possible.”
— Otto von Bismarck, Interview (11 August 1867) with Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck of the St. Petersburgische Zeitung
“Part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”
— Hillary Rodham Clinton (although just Hillary Rodham at the time), “1969 Student Commencement Speech”
——
“Shyness is nice, and
Shyness can stop you
From doing all the things in life
You'd like to
So, if there's something you'd like to try
If there's something you'd like to try
Ask me, I won't say no, how could I?
Coyness is nice, and
Coyness can stop you
From saying all the things in
Life you'd like to
So, if there's something you'd like to try
If there's something you'd like to try
Ask me, I won't say no, how could I?
Spending warm summer days indoors
Writing frightening verse
To a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg
Ask me, ask me, ask me
Ask me, ask me, ask me
Because if it’s not love
Then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb
That will bring us together”
— The Smiths, “Ask”
(Although I prefer Colin Meloy’s cover.)
——
“since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis”
— e.e. cummings, “since feeling is first”
——
“so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens”
— William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
——
“She even thinks that up in heaven
Her class lies late and snores,
While poor black cherubs rise at seven
To do celestial chores.”
— Countee Cullen, “For A Lady I Know”
——
“When we watch syntethic drama we suspend disbelief so that when we see something shocking we are willing to go with it and to submit to whatever manipulation the creator of the drama has in store for us. Synthetic drama is always larger than life, however understated or tasteful it is.
Real drama, on the other hand, is a different experience. Real drama is marked by a sense of the mundane. There is no sign of suspension of disbelief. We see and hear things and our senses send all the right messages to the brain, but it turns them away because they are too bizarre for admittance.”
—Donald Woods, Biko
——
“Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something superpersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side.”
— Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
——
“The plight of non-Nazi Germans in the summer of 1933 was certainly one of the most difficult a person can find himself in: a condition in which one is hopelessly, utterly overwhelmed, accompanied by the shock of having been caught completely off balance. We were in the Nazis’ hands for good or ill. All lines of defense had fallen, any collective resistance had become impossible. Individual resistance was only a form of suicide. We were pursued into the farthest corners of our private lives; in all areas of life there was rout, panic, and flight. No one could tell where it would end. At the same time we were called upon, not to surrender, but to renege. Just a little pact with the devil -and you were no longer one of the captured quarry. Instead you were one of the vicious hunters.
That was the simplest and crudest temptation. Many succumbed to it. Later they often found that the price to be paid was higher than they had thought and that they were no match for the real Nazis. There are many thousands of them today in Germany, Nazis with a bad conscience. People who wear their Nazi badges like Macbeth wore his royal robes, who, in for a penny, in for a pound, now find their consciences shouldering one burden after another, who search in vain for a way out, drink and take sleeping pills, no longer dare to think, and do not know whether they should rather pray for the end of the Nazi era -their own era!- or dread it. When that end comes they will certainly not admit to having been the culprits. In the meantime, however, they are the nightmare of the world. It is impossible to assess what these people might still be capable of in their moral and psychological derangement. Their history has yet to be written.
Our predicament in 1933 held many other temptations apart from this, the crudest; each was a source of madness and mental sickness for those who yielded. The devil has many nets, crude ones for crude souls, finer ones for fine souls.
If you refused to become a Nazi you found yourself in a fiendish situation: it was one of complete and unalleviated hopelessness; you were daily subject to insults and humiliations, forced to watch unendurable scenes, had nowhere to turn to mitigate your anguish. Such a situation carries its own temptations: apparent remedies that hide the barb of the devil.”
— Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler
——
“Snark and smarm are friends who pose falsely as enemies, and one can stand against both of them at once.”
— Alexander Wells, “Snarking Towards Bethlehem: The Gawker Manifesto That Wasn’t”
——
“STEWART BRAND: On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
STEVE WOZNIAK: Information should be free, but your time should not.”
— Dialogue from the first Hackers Conference, 1984
——
“Can’t seem to wake you, kid, guess it
put you to sleep getting cut in two
I wonder what my mother will say
To hell with your old lady, kid, it’s you dead
like you read about beind dead
in the schoolbooks with medals all over
your chest and all the girls saying
Boy is he ever something on that big white horse
hell’s fire a hero dying for his ahem country
What is my country?
And all the fine buildings with flags fluttering
thataboy some class a first-rate bloke
with bubbles of blood in his hair
There are a lot of jails in America…a lot of poor boys
trying to get somewhere.
Hello, kid
still dead?
I had a lot to do a lot to see”
— Kenneth Patchen, The Body Beside the Ties
——
“The taste
of rain
—Why kneel?”
— Jack Kerouac
——
“I read a quote from an elderly priest some years ago, who was asked what he had learned about human nature from 40 years of listening to confessions. He said, ‘First, the world is full of unhappy people. And second, there are no grown-ups.’”
— Eyebrows McGee, Comment #2179810
——
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
– (Anthony) Stafford Beer
——
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, introduction to Mother Night
——
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
— Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”
——
“‘Your father,’ said Saunders, ‘is a lost cause. He thinks boys are great, and he’s never going to think you’re anything because you’re a girl.’
‘Well,’ says Golden, ‘I can’t change that.’
‘No, but you could stop wanting him to change,’ said Saunders.
Emma felt like the top of her head would fly off. Saunders got it, the whole thing. ‘That’s what I mean,’ said Emma loudly. ‘That’s just what I’m talking about. We have to stop waiting around for them to love us.’”
— Louise Fitzhugh, Nobody’s Family is Going to Change (as quoted by Ira Glass on This American Life)
——
“Welcome everything; push away nothing.
Find a place of stillness in the middle of things.
Don’t wait.
Cultivate ‘Don’t know’ mind.
Bring your whole self into the room.”
— janey47’s description of the five precepts of care-giving practiced at the Zen Hospice Project; they were developed by Frank Ostaseski.
——
“Well, maybe for certain people—maybe for certain people who lived at the beginning of the twentieth century—what was hidden and unconscious was the inner life. Maybe the only thing those people could see was the outward circumstance, where they were, what they did, and they had no idea at all of what was inside them. But something's been hidden from me, too. Something—a part of myself—has been hidden from me, and I think it's the part that's there on the surface, what anyone in the world could see about me if they saw me out the window of a passing train.”
— Wallace Shawn, The Fever
——
“The captain had an answer for everything tonight. He hadn’t been listening to their lies for twenty-odd years for nothing.
‘I cook on the Santa Fe.’
‘Glad to know it. After this I’ll ride the Southern Pacific.’ He dismissed the cook for some gaunt wreck in a smudged clerical collar. ‘Are you a preacher?’ The captain sounded puzzled.
‘I’ve been defrocked.’
‘You still preach pretty good when it comes to cashing phony checks. What were you defrocked for?’
‘Because I believe we are all members of one another.’
That one stopped the captain cold. He studied the wreck as if suddenly so uncertain of himself that he was afraid to ask him what he had meant by that. ‘I don’t get it,’ he acknowledged at last, and passed on, with greater confidence, to a little heroin-head batting his eyes and coughing the little dry addict’s cough politely into his palm.”
— Nelson Algren, The Man With The Golden Arm
——
“My friends do not know
about the soft black thing inside me
when I am talking to them, while I am sleeping
It floats next to my bed
it is not for any of them
soon they will start to see it
when I kiss them they will feel it
protrude into them
and when they are laying next to me
they will feel the warmth of it
nothing is keeping me from it
and I know one day there will be nothing left that anyone can do for me
it will become me
it will envelope me completely”
— R.L. Kelly, “Fake Out” (lyrics by Eric Livingston)
——
“Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Under the paving-stones, the beach!”)
— Slogan dating from the 1968 Paris student riots, used by Thomas Pynchon as an opening epigraph to Inherent Vice
——
“It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records.....
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.”
– Naomi Shihab Nye, “So Much Happiness”
”When our English teacher gave
our first writing invitation of the year,
Become a kitchen implement
in 2 descriptive paragraphs, I did not think
butcher knife or frying pan,
I thought immediately
of soft flour showering throught the little holes
of the sifter and the sifter’s pleasing circular
swishing sound, and wrote it down.
Rhoda became a teaspoon,
Roberto a funnel,
Jim a muffin time
and Forrest a soup pot.
We read our paragraphs out loud.
Abby was a blender. Everyone laughed
and acted but the more we thought about it,
we were all everything in the whole kitchen,
drawers and drainers,
singing teapot and grapefruit spoon
with serrated edges, we were all the
empty cup, the tray.
This, said our teacher, is the beauty of metaphor.
It opens doors.
What I could not know then
was how being a sifter
would help me all year long.
When bad days came
I would close my eyes and feel them passing
through the tiny holes.
When good days came
I would try to contain them gently
the way flour remains
in the sifter until you turn the handle.
Time, time. I was a sweet sifter in time
and no one ever knew.”
– Naomi Shihab Nye, “Sifter”
——
“The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain
Thus it is like the Tao.
In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don’t try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.
When you are content to be simply yourself
and don’t compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.”
— Laozi, Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell
“Water is the source of all life, life’s matrix and fecundity; it overflows into everything, it moves everywhere. We are fundamentally water: muscled water. And the idea that we ever leave the amniotic fluid is a misconception. The amniotic fluid is the state of total nourishment and unconditional love. It is always present for us and contains everything we could possibly want. In fact, we are that fluid of love.”
— Emilie Conrad, commenting on the first line of Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching
——
“In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting.”
— John Cage, from the essay “Four Statements on The Dance” in the Silence collection. (p.93)
——
“Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it”
— Frank O’Hara, Having a Coke with You
“Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
——
“‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.”
— George Orwell, “Charles Dickens”
——
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953. (This speech is colloquially known as “The Cross of Iron” speech.)
——
“Work, Not Wages”
— Depression-era union/socialist slogan
——
“‘Okay world,’ I said, ‘I’ll love ya.’”
— Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
——
“you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye”
— Margaret Atwood, You fit into me
——
“Don’t take life so serious, son, it ain’t nohow permanent.”
— Porky Pine, in Walt Kelly’s Pogo
“Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.
“There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.
“Forward!”
— Walt Kelly, forward to The Pogo Papers
——
“[Nadia Boulanger] made me understand that I wasn’t, for every little piece I wrote, in competition with the ghost of Beethoven or Brahms, that it was more like writing a letter; I had something on my mind and could perhaps say it clearly, and that was quite sufficient.”
— Virgil Thomson, in an interview with Studs Terkel; collected in And They All Sang
——
“…and how he kissed me
under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then
I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I
yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and
his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses
(Someday I should probably actually read UUlysses, but this line is poetic even if oh so tired.)
——
“Jesus said: When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will destroy you.”
— The Gospel of Thomas, translated by Stephen Davies
——
“And the love we hold,
and the love we spurn,
will never
grow cold
only taciturn.”
— Joanna Newsom, “Sadie”
——
“But there was a time we were lashed to the prow
of a ship you may board, but not steer,
before You and I ceased to mean Now,
and began to mean only Right Here
(to mean Inches and Miles, but not Years);
before Space had a taste of its limits,
and a new sort of coordinate awoke,
making Time just another poor tenant:
bearing weight, taking fire, trading smokes,
in the war between us and our ghosts
— Joanna Newsom, “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”
——
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
— Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince
——
“HARPER: But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things.”
— Tony Kushner, Angels In America
——
“Happiness is such hard work, and it gets harder every day
And it can kill you, but no one wants to be that tacky about it”
— The Dismemberment Plan, “Gyroscope”
“And sometimes that music drifts through my car
On a spring night when anything is possible
And I close my eyes and I nod my head
And I wonder how you been
And I count to a hundred and ten
Because you’ll always be my hero
Even if I never see you again”
– The Dismemberment Plan, “Back and Forth”
——
“DYSART: Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods.”
— Peter Shaffer, Equus
——
“Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?”
— A.E. Stallings, Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther
——
“GREG: I am approaching you and giving you a positive greeting which I am counting on you to return in such a way that I will feel completely vindicated in my hope and desire that I am a good person, who deserves the love of others, and the love of myself, every single second of every single day!”
— Greg Allen, The Lower Depths
——
“LITTLE SALLY: I don’t think too many people are going to come see this play, Officer Lockstock.
LOCKSTOCK: Why do you say that, Little Sally? Don’t you think people want to be told that their way of life is unsustainable?”
— Greg Kotis, Urinetown
——
“The reader of these pages should not look for detailed documentation of every word. In treating of the general problems of culture one is constantly obliged to undertake predatory incursions into provinces not sufficiently explored by the raider himself. To fill in all the gaps in my knowledge beforehand was out of the question for me. I had to write now, or not at all. And I wanted to write.”
— Johan Huizinga, forward to Homo Ludens
——
“In the Kamigata area they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. As might be expected, this is one of my recollections of the capital. The end is important in all things.”
— Tsunetomo Yamamoto, The Hagakure, as quoted in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog
——
“OBI-WAN: You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”
— Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas, Return of the Jedi
——
“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
“Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
(One can take almost every sentence Marilynne Robinson has set down as a beautiful and intelligent quote. She is a wonder.)
“It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.”
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
(Oh, bother. This is a Goodreads page full of quotes from Robinson. Go knock yourself out; I’m moving on.)
——
“A prime part of the history of our Constitution is the story of the extension of constitutional rights to people once ignored or excluded.”
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg, United States v. Virginia
——
“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
— Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
——
“The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you got born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.”
— Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men
——
“Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it.
What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism
is always a sign of things no ears have heard,
no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.”
— Miller Williams, “The Ways We Touch”
——
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
——
“All models are wrong but some are useful”
— George Box
——
“The hero is a man actively engaged in become himself—never a very reassuring sight. The villain, on the other hand, has already become something. Everything about Tsukigata suggests that he has arrived. There is not a wasted gesture, not an uncalculated movement. He has found what is to his advantage and acts accordingly. Sugata, by comparison, is all thumbs.
Kurosawa’s preference is the preference we all have for the formed man. In the ordinary film this man would be the hero. But he is not and, despite his admiration, Kurosawa has told us why. One of the attributes of all of his heroes, beginning with Sugata, is that they are unformed in just this way. For this reason, all of his pictures are about education—the education of the hero.
After this superb battle… one might expect the picture to end with some kind of statement that he has has at last grown-up, that he has arrived, that he has become something—the great judo champion. This would be the logical Western conclusion to a film about the education of a hero.
Kurosawa, however, has seen that this cannot be true. A hero who actually becomes is tantamount to a villain—for this was the only tangible aspect of the villain’s villainy. To suggest that peace, contentment, happiness follows a single battle, no matter how important, is literally untrue—and it would limit Sugata precisely because of the limitations suggested in the words ‘happiness’ or ‘judo champion.’”
— Donald Richie, “Sugata Sanshiro” in The Films of Akira Kurosawa. I encountered this quote when Helen DeWitt used it in The Last Samurai.
——
“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words down to the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign them to the dust and the dark.
“There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.”
— Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
“He said: And what exactly did you think this hypothetical CD could do for this hypothetical person?
He was smiling. He was strumming the strings of the piano softly.
I said: What if the person got off the Circle Line at Embankment, crossed the bridge to Waterloo, took a train to Paris and went to work for a famous sculptor?
He said: What, because of some stupid CD? What planet are you living on?
I said: The premise was that there were only 5 people on the planet who would buy the CD, obviously most people would not get off at Embankment because of a CD but maybe the type of person who would buy the CD would be the type of person who would.
I said
The type of person who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.
The type of person who always wants things to be different. The type of person who would rather die than read Sportsboat and Waterski International
Oh, he said. That type of person.”
— Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
——
“The man you see before you is here by the grace of God. The fact that it took twelve and a half years and a movie to prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room and, if it doesn’t, then that scares the hell out of me.”
— Randall Dale Adams, quoted in “Adams v. The Death Penalty”
——
“It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.”
— Wendell Berry, “The Loss of the Future”
——
“We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”
— Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur (disputed)
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
— Anaïs Nin, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study
——
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
— Anatole France, The Red Lily
——
“Reality is Reality. It transcends every concept”
— Thích Nhất Hạnh
“In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.”
— Thích Nhất Hạnh
——
“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
— Gustav Flaubert, Letter to Gertrude Tenant
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
——
“This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That
O it is This
and it is Thus
and it is Them
and it is Us
and it is Now
and Here It is
and Here We are
so This is It”
— James Broughton, This is It
——
“Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge (You know that the form of speech will change)
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho (within a thousand years, and words that)
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge (were once apt, we now regard as quaint and strange;)
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so, (and yet they spoke them thus,)
And spedde as wel in love as men now do” (and succeeded as well in love as men do now.)
— Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
——
“If you’re honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you’re forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.”
— Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker
——
“Joy is the yeast that makes [the soul] rise.”
— Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
——
“You know… for kids.”
—————
My current profile picture is Jay Ryan’s “Nine Black Puppies”
—————
MetaFilter: ebb & flow
If you’re suffering from severe depression or black thoughts, there is help on the MeFi Wiki. It’s not a silver bullet, but nothing is.
Since clicking a link can be difficult, here is LobsterMitten’s summary of AskMe depression advice (lightly formatted/edited):
- Seek therapy or other one-on-one counseling for help
breaking thought patterns that keep you depressed.
Make and keep therapy appointments.
If you don’t click with the first therapist,
don’t give up!
Try another therapist. - Maybe seek meds;
different ones work for different people. - Exercise;
this doesn’t have to be as hard as you might think. - Be around people:
a job;
housemates;
a coffee shop.
Online doesn’t count for this. - Shower,
dress
and get out of the house every day
for at least a little while. - Eat a sensible amount of healthy food.
- Sleep a reasonable amount.
If you are sleeping more than 10 hours a day,
make routines with help from others
that will help you break out of that pattern. - Don't make up excuses for why you can’t do any of 1-7.
Making up excuses to stay depressed is a big part of depression. - If these aren’t helping,
try again.
Let someone know.
(“Move a muscle, change a thought” isn’t always true, but it can be.)
If you’re just feeling a bit down, perhaps consider Too-Ticky’s “list of ten things that give me satisfaction”:
- Make something (can be very small or simple)
- Learn something new (can also be very small; for example, a new word)
- Repair something or fix a problem
- Find a proper place to keep something and put it there
- Clean something that needs cleaning (maybe pick up some trash on a walk?)
- Help someone to do something
- Surprise someone (for example, send them a card)
- Spend time with an animal or do something for them (feed birds?)
- Do something that you know future you will appreciate
- Do something that's good for your health
Maybe one can give you satisfaction as well.
—————
Read the guidelines and try to think about them before commenting. If you see a comment that seems gross, it might well violate them.
If you want to find other MeFites based on the social networks/apps that they’ve listed in their profile, use the Social Explorer! It’s a great little piece of the site that’s tucked away where no one can find it.
If you want to export your comments, you can do that here.
—————
Long time lurker, first time username holder! I chose this username because I very much like The Mountain Goats’ song of the same title. If you’re curious about the band, I heartily endorse this free recording of the 2007 ZOOP concert. ZOOP was a fundraiser for Farm Sanctuary’s shelter in Watkins Glen, NY. It’s dear to the heart of lead singer / often-sole-member John Darnielle, and the two nights of shows have a joyous, campfire sing-along vibe to them.
—————
I’ve made several posts to the blue but my first is my favorite. My ninth got my favorite responses. My twenty-seventh is my most embarrassing; avoid using spicy pull quotes when making an FPP about something you care about. Instead of sparking an interesting discussion about a controversial figure, you’ll just sow a bunch of discord.
Relative to that last point: dropping a bunch of knowledge on someone who hasn’t asked for it and may well disagree with it -especially if it's highly subjective knowledge or information that you consider so fundamental that its wisdom is self-evident- is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from trolling.
This isn’t to say that trolling or snark are necessarily bad things - people engage in both on the site when they want to drag an idea that they disagree with, and are perhaps an important part of keeping a community sassy. But trolling when you think you’re helping is awful.
—————
My first AskMe question was about finding a copy of the old Sleater-Kinney “live vault” fan recordings of shows . If you’re curious about the live vault, shoot me a MeMail.
—————
I love a good quote. These used to live on a different site, but many perished during a redesign. The remainder now live here, along with some new friends. While once ordered chronologically according to my discovering them, they’ve since been sort of arranged by them and type. Sort of. (And yes, I’m counting poems as quotes. If you don’t want to count poems as quotes, please make your own list.)
——
“I wish the rent
was heaven sent”
—Langston Hughes, Little Lyric (of Great Importance)
——
“You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men”
—Barbara Kruger, Untitled (You Construct Intricate Rituals), 1981.
——
“I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.”
— Lloyd Dobbler, as written by Cameron Crowe in Say Anything….
——
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
— Walt Whitman, from verse 51 of Song of Myself
——
“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on Earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
— Eugene V. Debs, from his statement to the Federal Court in Cleveland, 1918
——
“What happened to him in the woods, Knight claimed, was inexplicable. But he agreed to set aside his fear of phony wisdom and koans and give it a try. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can’t dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here’s the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.’”
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger In The Woods
——
“It is important that you recognize that there is no experience that comes into your life that is below your dignity”
— an epigram at the start of Walking Through Clear Water In A Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller, and credited to “Dr. Peebles, a nineteenth century Scottish doctor. This is most likely the spiritualist and quack James Martin Peebles.
——
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
— C.S. Lewis, from “On Three Ways Of Writing For Children”
——
“The prayers of both [North and South] could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
— Abraham Lincoln, second inaugural address
——
“I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster. It can never be rolled back, or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction.”
— Nick Cave, responding to a fan asking him about a song ChatGPT wrote aping his style.
——
“The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.”
— Umberto Eco, Reflections on The Name of the Rose; trans. William Weaver, London: Minerva, 1994, pp. 67-68. (Citation and quote taken from here, but I believe it may be in a post-script attached to various editions of The Name of the Rose itself.)
——
“The suicide doesn’t go alone, he takes everybody with him”
— William Maxwell, The Folded Leaf (as quoted by Joan Wickersham in The Suicide Index
——
“I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his “Radio Address on the Election of Liberals” on November 4, 1938. (As quoted by Umberto Eco in his essay “Ur-Fascism”, published in The New York Review Of Books in the June 22, 1995 issue.)
——
“If I could return to that job interview from more than three years ago, to that moment when I was asked about my responsibility as a creative-nonfiction writer in the post-truth world, I know what I would say now: Our allegiance as nonfiction writers is not so much to truth as it is to honesty. Because truth can be spoken into a void, while honesty implies an audience, a reader, real people to whom you commit to tell your story as accurately and truthfully as you can so that they can then differentiate for themselves the facts from the lies, the truth from the fiction.”
— Sarah Viren, “The Accusations Were Lies. But Could We Prove It?”
——
“One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly afterwards the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female Voice said YES?
‘O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!’
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON'T SOUND WELL.
‘I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.’
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
‘But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it.’
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left The Polyfather stranded alone with his species.”
— Gregory Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley, The Principia Discordia 38
——
“Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.”
— Maggie Smith, “Good Bones”
——
“Consider this clipping from the New York Times, dated April 15, 1986. At the top of the page is a fourteen-inch story about Desmond Tutu’s election as Archbishop of Capetown, and thus head of South Africa’s Anglican Church. It is an elegant piece of writing, intended to evoke a cathedral mood, a reverent silence in which one might hear stirring the most noble aspects of the human spirit, unquestionable in its thirst for freedom and justice…
Beneath the Tutu story is a minute headline reading, ‘Eleven Die in Night of Violence’, and a squib of copy summarizing the government’s overnight ‘unrest report.’ … And beneath that, unheralded by any headline, are two cryptic little sentences about the discovery, in a place called Sekhukuniland, of something horrible beyond comprehesion: the remains of thirty-two African women, hurled alive into pits of flame.. This was the worst mass murder in South African history, and it took place in a context that The Times clearly could not bring itself to explain. The seventy-six black youths arrested in connection with the massacre were all members or supporters of the UDF - the supposedly non-violent movement championed by the Nobel Peace Laureate at the head of the page. Th thirty-two victims were suspected of using sorcery to retard the freedom struggle and were incinerated in the name of fundamental change.”
— Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart
It feels strange to include an ellipsis to a quote, but I feel obliged. The complicated history of South Africa and the end of apartheid has been flattened in the American imagination (including my own) despite being incredibly recent. What parts of our own pasts are we unknowingly simplifying and smoothing over?
——
“Down South they don’t care how close I am as long as I don’t get too big, and up North they don’t care how big I am as long as I don’t get too close.”
— Dick Gregory (I’m unclear on the specific source of the quote in Gregory’s writings or performances.)
——
“Me sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.”
— @screaminbutcalm (The Golden Sir) (A solid riff on Galatians 6:7)
——
“My son… showed me his favorite all-Mormon sketch comedy troupe. They had all met and started performing comedy at Brigham Young University, but they stayed together after graduation and were now putting out two videos a week for their two million Youtube subscribers. They were wildly popular, and like all wildly popular things these days, no one had ever heard of them.”
— John Hodgman, Medallion Status
——
“A freckled and frivolous cake there was
That sailed upon a pointless sea,
Or any lugubrious lake there was
In a manner emphatic and free.
How jointlessly, and how jointlessly
The frivolous cake sailed by
On the waves of the ocean that pointlessly
Threw fish to the lilac sky.
Oh, plenty and plenty of hake there was
Of a glory beyond compare,
And every conceivable make there was
Was tossed through the lilac air.
Up the smooth billows and over the crests
Of the cumbersome combers flew
The frivolous cake with a knife in the wake
Of herself and her curranty crew.
Like a swordfish grim it would bounce and skim
(This dinner knife fierce and blue) ,
And the frivolous cake was filled to the brim
With the fun of her curranty crew.
Oh, plenty and plenty of hake there was
Of a glory beyond compare -
And every conceivable make there was
Was tossed through the lilac air.
Around the shores of the Elegant Isles
Where the cat-fish bask and purr
And lick their paws with adhesive smiles
And wriggle their fins of fur,
They fly and fly 'neath the lilac sky -
The frivolous cake, and the knife
Who winketh his glamorous indigo eye
In the wake of his future wife.
The crumbs blow free down the pointless sea
To the beat of a cakey heart
And the sensitive steel of the knife can feel
That love is a race apart
In the speed of the lingering light are blown
The crumbs to the hake above,
And the tropical air vibrates to the drone
Of a cake in the throes of love.”
— Mervyn Peak, “The Frivolous Cake”. This poem is embedded in his book Titus Groan. (A lino cut illustration of the poem.)
——
“JIMMY DELL: I think you'll find that if what you've done for them is as valuable as you say it is, if they are indebted to you morally but not legally, my experience is they will give you nothing, and they will begin to act cruelly toward you.
JOE ROSS: Why?
JIMMY DELL: To suppress their guilt.”
— David Mamet, The Spanish Prisoner. (Mamet is a bit of a controversial figure these days, but it’s a good line.)
——
“Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”
— Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
——
”Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
— William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
——
“Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.”
— Seamus Heaney, “Anything Can Happen (after Horace, Odes, I, 34.)”
——
“i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what I love
and i leave to forgive me”
— Lucille Clifton, in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (1969 - 1980)
——
“CECIL GRAHAM: What is a cynic?
LORD DARLINGTON: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
CECIL GRAHAM: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”
— Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan
“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.
The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.
We cannot go on living like this.”
— Tony Judt, the introduction to Ill Fares The Land.
——
“I left the store with [the batik sarong] on. For the next two years, I wore it constantly. I wore it to parties, hiking in the mountains and ambling down city streets. I knew it was only a piece of clothing, but it felt like a step away from my past and toward something unfamiliar. I grew my hair long, tied it in braids, adorned it with beads and feathers. I looked as cartoonish as you’re probably imagining, but that was the point. It came as a revelation that you could walk through town, barefoot and shirtless in a wraparound skirt, with silver crosses dangling from pierced nipples, with Byzantine tattoos, with your beads and feathers swaying like a headdress, and no one even shrugged. I knew that my cousin would have laughed if he’d seen me. A year earlier, I would have laughed at myself.”
— Wil S. Hylton, “My Cousin Was My Hero, Until He Tried To Kill Me”. (The New York Times, May 8, 2019)
——
“Lighght”
— Aram Saroyan (Saroyan on his poem in Mother Jones)
——
“WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS HEALED? WHO IS HOUSED? WHO SPEAKS? WHO IS SILENCED? WHO SALUTES LONGEST? WHO PRAYS LOUDEST? WHO DIES FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST? | LOOK FOR THE MOMENT WHEN PRIDE BECOMES CONTEMPT”
—Barbara Kruger Untitled (Questions), 1991. (A variant of the original, currently installed at MOCA in Los Angeles.)
——
“The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out”
—Nael, age 6, “The Tiger”, printed in They’re Singing a Song in Their Rocket (A comic of the poem.)
——
“The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.”
— Philip Larkin, “The Mower”
——
“National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals, a necessary condition for self-improvement.”
— Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country. (As quoted by Stephen Metcalf in The New Yorker: “Richard Rorty’s Philosophical Argument for National Pride”.)
——
“I’m scrambling an egg for my daughter.
“Why are you always whistling?” she asks.
“Because I’m happy.”
And it’s true,
Though it stuns me to say it aloud;
There was a time when I wouldn’t
Have seen it as my future.
It’s partly a matter
Of who is there to eat the egg:
The self fallen out of love with itself
Through the tedium of familiarity,
Or this little self,
So curious, so hungry,
Who emerged from the woman I love,
A woman who loves me in a way
I’ve come to think I deserve,
Now that it arrives from outside me.
Everything changes, we’re told,
And now the changes are everywhere:
The house with its morning light
That fills me like a revelation,
The yard with its trees
That cast a bit more shade each summer,
The love of a woman
That both is and isn’t confounding,
And the love
Of this clamor of questions at my waist.
Clamor of questions,
You clamor of answers,
Here’s your egg.”
— C.G.Hanzlicek, “Egg”
——
“I guess I don’t really like solitude. The fun is hammering bits of it out of a crowded life.”
— Robert Lowell, from a letter to Elizabeth Bishop
——
“I wanted to make something. I wanted to finish my own sentences.”
— Louise Glück, as quoted by Sarah Ruhl
——
“…and finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses.”
— Sarah Ruhl, “On Interruptions” in
——
“Politics is the art of the possible.”
— Otto von Bismarck, Interview (11 August 1867) with Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck of the St. Petersburgische Zeitung
“Part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”
— Hillary Rodham Clinton (although just Hillary Rodham at the time), “1969 Student Commencement Speech”
——
“Shyness is nice, and
Shyness can stop you
From doing all the things in life
You'd like to
So, if there's something you'd like to try
If there's something you'd like to try
Ask me, I won't say no, how could I?
Coyness is nice, and
Coyness can stop you
From saying all the things in
Life you'd like to
So, if there's something you'd like to try
If there's something you'd like to try
Ask me, I won't say no, how could I?
Spending warm summer days indoors
Writing frightening verse
To a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg
Ask me, ask me, ask me
Ask me, ask me, ask me
Because if it’s not love
Then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb
That will bring us together”
— The Smiths, “Ask”
(Although I prefer Colin Meloy’s cover.)
——
“since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis”
— e.e. cummings, “since feeling is first”
——
“so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens”
— William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
——
“She even thinks that up in heaven
Her class lies late and snores,
While poor black cherubs rise at seven
To do celestial chores.”
— Countee Cullen, “For A Lady I Know”
——
“When we watch syntethic drama we suspend disbelief so that when we see something shocking we are willing to go with it and to submit to whatever manipulation the creator of the drama has in store for us. Synthetic drama is always larger than life, however understated or tasteful it is.
Real drama, on the other hand, is a different experience. Real drama is marked by a sense of the mundane. There is no sign of suspension of disbelief. We see and hear things and our senses send all the right messages to the brain, but it turns them away because they are too bizarre for admittance.”
—Donald Woods, Biko
——
“Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something superpersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side.”
— Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
——
“The plight of non-Nazi Germans in the summer of 1933 was certainly one of the most difficult a person can find himself in: a condition in which one is hopelessly, utterly overwhelmed, accompanied by the shock of having been caught completely off balance. We were in the Nazis’ hands for good or ill. All lines of defense had fallen, any collective resistance had become impossible. Individual resistance was only a form of suicide. We were pursued into the farthest corners of our private lives; in all areas of life there was rout, panic, and flight. No one could tell where it would end. At the same time we were called upon, not to surrender, but to renege. Just a little pact with the devil -and you were no longer one of the captured quarry. Instead you were one of the vicious hunters.
That was the simplest and crudest temptation. Many succumbed to it. Later they often found that the price to be paid was higher than they had thought and that they were no match for the real Nazis. There are many thousands of them today in Germany, Nazis with a bad conscience. People who wear their Nazi badges like Macbeth wore his royal robes, who, in for a penny, in for a pound, now find their consciences shouldering one burden after another, who search in vain for a way out, drink and take sleeping pills, no longer dare to think, and do not know whether they should rather pray for the end of the Nazi era -their own era!- or dread it. When that end comes they will certainly not admit to having been the culprits. In the meantime, however, they are the nightmare of the world. It is impossible to assess what these people might still be capable of in their moral and psychological derangement. Their history has yet to be written.
Our predicament in 1933 held many other temptations apart from this, the crudest; each was a source of madness and mental sickness for those who yielded. The devil has many nets, crude ones for crude souls, finer ones for fine souls.
If you refused to become a Nazi you found yourself in a fiendish situation: it was one of complete and unalleviated hopelessness; you were daily subject to insults and humiliations, forced to watch unendurable scenes, had nowhere to turn to mitigate your anguish. Such a situation carries its own temptations: apparent remedies that hide the barb of the devil.”
— Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler
——
“Snark and smarm are friends who pose falsely as enemies, and one can stand against both of them at once.”
— Alexander Wells, “Snarking Towards Bethlehem: The Gawker Manifesto That Wasn’t”
——
“STEWART BRAND: On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
STEVE WOZNIAK: Information should be free, but your time should not.”
— Dialogue from the first Hackers Conference, 1984
——
“Can’t seem to wake you, kid, guess it
put you to sleep getting cut in two
I wonder what my mother will say
To hell with your old lady, kid, it’s you dead
like you read about beind dead
in the schoolbooks with medals all over
your chest and all the girls saying
Boy is he ever something on that big white horse
hell’s fire a hero dying for his ahem country
What is my country?
And all the fine buildings with flags fluttering
thataboy some class a first-rate bloke
with bubbles of blood in his hair
There are a lot of jails in America…a lot of poor boys
trying to get somewhere.
Hello, kid
still dead?
I had a lot to do a lot to see”
— Kenneth Patchen, The Body Beside the Ties
——
“The taste
of rain
—Why kneel?”
— Jack Kerouac
——
“I read a quote from an elderly priest some years ago, who was asked what he had learned about human nature from 40 years of listening to confessions. He said, ‘First, the world is full of unhappy people. And second, there are no grown-ups.’”
— Eyebrows McGee, Comment #2179810
——
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
– (Anthony) Stafford Beer
——
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, introduction to Mother Night
——
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
— Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”
——
“‘Your father,’ said Saunders, ‘is a lost cause. He thinks boys are great, and he’s never going to think you’re anything because you’re a girl.’
‘Well,’ says Golden, ‘I can’t change that.’
‘No, but you could stop wanting him to change,’ said Saunders.
Emma felt like the top of her head would fly off. Saunders got it, the whole thing. ‘That’s what I mean,’ said Emma loudly. ‘That’s just what I’m talking about. We have to stop waiting around for them to love us.’”
— Louise Fitzhugh, Nobody’s Family is Going to Change (as quoted by Ira Glass on This American Life)
——
“Welcome everything; push away nothing.
Find a place of stillness in the middle of things.
Don’t wait.
Cultivate ‘Don’t know’ mind.
Bring your whole self into the room.”
— janey47’s description of the five precepts of care-giving practiced at the Zen Hospice Project; they were developed by Frank Ostaseski.
——
“Well, maybe for certain people—maybe for certain people who lived at the beginning of the twentieth century—what was hidden and unconscious was the inner life. Maybe the only thing those people could see was the outward circumstance, where they were, what they did, and they had no idea at all of what was inside them. But something's been hidden from me, too. Something—a part of myself—has been hidden from me, and I think it's the part that's there on the surface, what anyone in the world could see about me if they saw me out the window of a passing train.”
— Wallace Shawn, The Fever
——
“The captain had an answer for everything tonight. He hadn’t been listening to their lies for twenty-odd years for nothing.
‘I cook on the Santa Fe.’
‘Glad to know it. After this I’ll ride the Southern Pacific.’ He dismissed the cook for some gaunt wreck in a smudged clerical collar. ‘Are you a preacher?’ The captain sounded puzzled.
‘I’ve been defrocked.’
‘You still preach pretty good when it comes to cashing phony checks. What were you defrocked for?’
‘Because I believe we are all members of one another.’
That one stopped the captain cold. He studied the wreck as if suddenly so uncertain of himself that he was afraid to ask him what he had meant by that. ‘I don’t get it,’ he acknowledged at last, and passed on, with greater confidence, to a little heroin-head batting his eyes and coughing the little dry addict’s cough politely into his palm.”
— Nelson Algren, The Man With The Golden Arm
——
“My friends do not know
about the soft black thing inside me
when I am talking to them, while I am sleeping
It floats next to my bed
it is not for any of them
soon they will start to see it
when I kiss them they will feel it
protrude into them
and when they are laying next to me
they will feel the warmth of it
nothing is keeping me from it
and I know one day there will be nothing left that anyone can do for me
it will become me
it will envelope me completely”
— R.L. Kelly, “Fake Out” (lyrics by Eric Livingston)
——
“Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Under the paving-stones, the beach!”)
— Slogan dating from the 1968 Paris student riots, used by Thomas Pynchon as an opening epigraph to Inherent Vice
——
“It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records.....
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.”
– Naomi Shihab Nye, “So Much Happiness”
”When our English teacher gave
our first writing invitation of the year,
Become a kitchen implement
in 2 descriptive paragraphs, I did not think
butcher knife or frying pan,
I thought immediately
of soft flour showering throught the little holes
of the sifter and the sifter’s pleasing circular
swishing sound, and wrote it down.
Rhoda became a teaspoon,
Roberto a funnel,
Jim a muffin time
and Forrest a soup pot.
We read our paragraphs out loud.
Abby was a blender. Everyone laughed
and acted but the more we thought about it,
we were all everything in the whole kitchen,
drawers and drainers,
singing teapot and grapefruit spoon
with serrated edges, we were all the
empty cup, the tray.
This, said our teacher, is the beauty of metaphor.
It opens doors.
What I could not know then
was how being a sifter
would help me all year long.
When bad days came
I would close my eyes and feel them passing
through the tiny holes.
When good days came
I would try to contain them gently
the way flour remains
in the sifter until you turn the handle.
Time, time. I was a sweet sifter in time
and no one ever knew.”
– Naomi Shihab Nye, “Sifter”
——
“The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain
Thus it is like the Tao.
In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don’t try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.
When you are content to be simply yourself
and don’t compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.”
— Laozi, Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell
“Water is the source of all life, life’s matrix and fecundity; it overflows into everything, it moves everywhere. We are fundamentally water: muscled water. And the idea that we ever leave the amniotic fluid is a misconception. The amniotic fluid is the state of total nourishment and unconditional love. It is always present for us and contains everything we could possibly want. In fact, we are that fluid of love.”
— Emilie Conrad, commenting on the first line of Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching
——
“In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting.”
— John Cage, from the essay “Four Statements on The Dance” in the Silence collection. (p.93)
——
“Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it”
— Frank O’Hara, Having a Coke with You
“Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
——
“‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.”
— George Orwell, “Charles Dickens”
——
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953. (This speech is colloquially known as “The Cross of Iron” speech.)
——
“Work, Not Wages”
— Depression-era union/socialist slogan
——
“‘Okay world,’ I said, ‘I’ll love ya.’”
— Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
——
“you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye”
— Margaret Atwood, You fit into me
——
“Don’t take life so serious, son, it ain’t nohow permanent.”
— Porky Pine, in Walt Kelly’s Pogo
“Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.
“There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.
“Forward!”
— Walt Kelly, forward to The Pogo Papers
——
“[Nadia Boulanger] made me understand that I wasn’t, for every little piece I wrote, in competition with the ghost of Beethoven or Brahms, that it was more like writing a letter; I had something on my mind and could perhaps say it clearly, and that was quite sufficient.”
— Virgil Thomson, in an interview with Studs Terkel; collected in And They All Sang
——
“…and how he kissed me
under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then
I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I
yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and
his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses
(Someday I should probably actually read UUlysses, but this line is poetic even if oh so tired.)
——
“Jesus said: When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will destroy you.”
— The Gospel of Thomas, translated by Stephen Davies
——
“And the love we hold,
and the love we spurn,
will never
grow cold
only taciturn.”
— Joanna Newsom, “Sadie”
——
“But there was a time we were lashed to the prow
of a ship you may board, but not steer,
before You and I ceased to mean Now,
and began to mean only Right Here
(to mean Inches and Miles, but not Years);
before Space had a taste of its limits,
and a new sort of coordinate awoke,
making Time just another poor tenant:
bearing weight, taking fire, trading smokes,
in the war between us and our ghosts
— Joanna Newsom, “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”
——
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
— Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince
——
“HARPER: But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things.”
— Tony Kushner, Angels In America
——
“Happiness is such hard work, and it gets harder every day
And it can kill you, but no one wants to be that tacky about it”
— The Dismemberment Plan, “Gyroscope”
“And sometimes that music drifts through my car
On a spring night when anything is possible
And I close my eyes and I nod my head
And I wonder how you been
And I count to a hundred and ten
Because you’ll always be my hero
Even if I never see you again”
– The Dismemberment Plan, “Back and Forth”
——
“DYSART: Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods.”
— Peter Shaffer, Equus
——
“Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?”
— A.E. Stallings, Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther
——
“GREG: I am approaching you and giving you a positive greeting which I am counting on you to return in such a way that I will feel completely vindicated in my hope and desire that I am a good person, who deserves the love of others, and the love of myself, every single second of every single day!”
— Greg Allen, The Lower Depths
——
“LITTLE SALLY: I don’t think too many people are going to come see this play, Officer Lockstock.
LOCKSTOCK: Why do you say that, Little Sally? Don’t you think people want to be told that their way of life is unsustainable?”
— Greg Kotis, Urinetown
——
“The reader of these pages should not look for detailed documentation of every word. In treating of the general problems of culture one is constantly obliged to undertake predatory incursions into provinces not sufficiently explored by the raider himself. To fill in all the gaps in my knowledge beforehand was out of the question for me. I had to write now, or not at all. And I wanted to write.”
— Johan Huizinga, forward to Homo Ludens
——
“In the Kamigata area they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. As might be expected, this is one of my recollections of the capital. The end is important in all things.”
— Tsunetomo Yamamoto, The Hagakure, as quoted in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog
——
“OBI-WAN: You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”
— Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas, Return of the Jedi
——
“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
“Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
(One can take almost every sentence Marilynne Robinson has set down as a beautiful and intelligent quote. She is a wonder.)
“It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.”
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
(Oh, bother. This is a Goodreads page full of quotes from Robinson. Go knock yourself out; I’m moving on.)
——
“A prime part of the history of our Constitution is the story of the extension of constitutional rights to people once ignored or excluded.”
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg, United States v. Virginia
——
“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
— Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
——
“The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you got born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.”
— Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men
——
“Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it.
What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism
is always a sign of things no ears have heard,
no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.”
— Miller Williams, “The Ways We Touch”
——
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
——
“All models are wrong but some are useful”
— George Box
——
“The hero is a man actively engaged in become himself—never a very reassuring sight. The villain, on the other hand, has already become something. Everything about Tsukigata suggests that he has arrived. There is not a wasted gesture, not an uncalculated movement. He has found what is to his advantage and acts accordingly. Sugata, by comparison, is all thumbs.
Kurosawa’s preference is the preference we all have for the formed man. In the ordinary film this man would be the hero. But he is not and, despite his admiration, Kurosawa has told us why. One of the attributes of all of his heroes, beginning with Sugata, is that they are unformed in just this way. For this reason, all of his pictures are about education—the education of the hero.
After this superb battle… one might expect the picture to end with some kind of statement that he has has at last grown-up, that he has arrived, that he has become something—the great judo champion. This would be the logical Western conclusion to a film about the education of a hero.
Kurosawa, however, has seen that this cannot be true. A hero who actually becomes is tantamount to a villain—for this was the only tangible aspect of the villain’s villainy. To suggest that peace, contentment, happiness follows a single battle, no matter how important, is literally untrue—and it would limit Sugata precisely because of the limitations suggested in the words ‘happiness’ or ‘judo champion.’”
— Donald Richie, “Sugata Sanshiro” in The Films of Akira Kurosawa. I encountered this quote when Helen DeWitt used it in The Last Samurai.
——
“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words down to the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign them to the dust and the dark.
“There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.”
— Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
“He said: And what exactly did you think this hypothetical CD could do for this hypothetical person?
He was smiling. He was strumming the strings of the piano softly.
I said: What if the person got off the Circle Line at Embankment, crossed the bridge to Waterloo, took a train to Paris and went to work for a famous sculptor?
He said: What, because of some stupid CD? What planet are you living on?
I said: The premise was that there were only 5 people on the planet who would buy the CD, obviously most people would not get off at Embankment because of a CD but maybe the type of person who would buy the CD would be the type of person who would.
I said
The type of person who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.
The type of person who always wants things to be different. The type of person who would rather die than read Sportsboat and Waterski International
Oh, he said. That type of person.”
— Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
——
“The man you see before you is here by the grace of God. The fact that it took twelve and a half years and a movie to prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room and, if it doesn’t, then that scares the hell out of me.”
— Randall Dale Adams, quoted in “Adams v. The Death Penalty”
——
“It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.”
— Wendell Berry, “The Loss of the Future”
——
“We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”
— Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur (disputed)
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
— Anaïs Nin, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study
——
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
— Anatole France, The Red Lily
——
“Reality is Reality. It transcends every concept”
— Thích Nhất Hạnh
“In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.”
— Thích Nhất Hạnh
——
“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
— Gustav Flaubert, Letter to Gertrude Tenant
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
——
“This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That
O it is This
and it is Thus
and it is Them
and it is Us
and it is Now
and Here It is
and Here We are
so This is It”
— James Broughton, This is It
——
“Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge (You know that the form of speech will change)
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho (within a thousand years, and words that)
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge (were once apt, we now regard as quaint and strange;)
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so, (and yet they spoke them thus,)
And spedde as wel in love as men now do” (and succeeded as well in love as men do now.)
— Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
——
“If you’re honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you’re forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.”
— Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker
——
“Joy is the yeast that makes [the soul] rise.”
— Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
——
“You know… for kids.”
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My current profile picture is Jay Ryan’s “Nine Black Puppies”
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MetaFilter: ebb & flow