Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
30 – Of all the good things here in the solitude, nothing could match a wall clock that went all through the dark winter, striking the hours prettily.
103 – … he was appalled at the expenses that being in love could lead to.
230 – Women cannot tell one man from another, not always, not often.
318 – You have no need of a sword in your hand, you walk through life barehanded and bareheaded in the midst of a great kindliness.
319 – Not everybody is, but you are: vital to the earth. You sustain life. You go on from generation to generation, fulfilling yourselves through sheer breeding; when you die, the new brood takes over. This is what is meant by eternal life.
A Vindication of Love by Cristina Nehring
2 – (Simone de Beauvoir) “There are few crimes which exacts a worst punishment than this generous fault: to put oneself entirely in another’s hands and thus be at his mercy.”
4 – If a man, as William Butler Yeats once claimed, “is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the work,” a woman is too often forced to choose perfection of the heart or of the head.
4 – How lucky for us: The literature of amorous surrender has inspired many of the resplendent poems of the English language.
6 – Love is “a frenzied passion which compels women to submit to a diminishing life in chains.” adds Andrea Dworkin in 1976.
7 – We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked, and emptied of spiritual consequence. We imagine that we live in an erotic culture of unprecedented opportunity when, in fact, we live in an erotic culture that is almost unendurably bland.
Language in Thought and Action by S.I and Alan Hayakawa
i read this after a Wired profile on Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist: “In 1972, while still a college student, he read ‘Language in Thought and Action’, the classic book on communication by S. I. Hayakawa, and it helped him understand himself better.”
8 – The cultural accomplishments of the ages, the invention of cooking, of weapons, of writing, of printing, of methods of building, of games and amusements, of means of transportation, and the discoveries of all the arts and sciences come to us as free gifts from the dead.
8 – To be able to read and write, therefore, is to learn to profit by and to take part in the greatest of human achievements–that which makes all other human achievements possible—namely, the pooling of our experience in great cooperative stores of knowledge, available (except where special priviledge, censorship, or suppression stand in the way) to all… Cultural and intellectual cooperation is, or should be, the great principle of human life.
15 – “Companion” means one with whom you share your bread.
18 – … if a Japanese school house caught fire, it used to be obligatory in the days of emperor worship to try to rescue the emperor’s picture (there was once in every schoolhouse), even at the risk of one’s life.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
80 – (on Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible) It’s all so arty there’s no art left in it.
81 – Geniuses don’t adjust their interpretations to suit the taste of tyrants.
142 – The belly is a demon. It doesn’t remember how well you treated it yesterday; it’ll cry out for more tomorrow.
163 – I’m not against God, understand that. I do believe in God. But I don’t believe in paradise or in hell. Why do you take us for fools and stuff us with your paradise and hell stories? That’s what I don’t like.
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
94 – (quoting Joe Vigil) ‘There are two goddesses in your heart. The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.”
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (Part 3)
71 – ‘Where is the need,’ I ask, ‘to compose something to last for ages? Why not stop trying to prevent posterity being silent about you? You were born to die, and a silent funeral is less bothersome. So if you must fill your time, write something in a simple style for your own use and not for publication: less toil is needed if you study only for the day.’
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (Part 2)
35 – So let those people go on weeping and wailing whose self-indulgent minds have been weakened by long prosperity, let them collapse at the threat of the most trivial injuries; but let those who have spent all their years suffering disasters endure the worst afflictions with a brave and resolute staunchness.
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (Part 1)
1 – It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.
Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.
4 – You, however, would do well to avoid those who complain about life’s unfairness, and instead get a head start on building self-restraint.
16 – … he decided his mouth had only three functions, and speaking was not one of them.
23 – … not compromised by the ravages of adult recreation.
40- When someone claims to regret nothing I just assume that he and I have different definitions for the word, and leave it at that.
48 – All they talk about is mysterious ways, and the evidence of things unseen.
299 – This is the key, you have learned—to relinquish control, to relinquish the desire for control.
302 – You wish they understood, as you do, that there is no escape and never was… You wish they understood that there is joy in this fact, greater joy and love in just this one last moment than they experienced in the entirety of their lives… Because even in this last moment there is still Everything, whole galaxies and eons, the sum total of every experience across time, shrunk to the head of a pin, theirs for the asking, right here, right now. And so anything, anything, anything is possible.
Yes, yes, yes…
a friend spotted this book at a holland village book store:
i decided to pick up a few juicy quotes from this book using Amazon’s Surprise Me feature:
- Why a man gotta bleed his pockets dry to show a woman a good time in order to get a little sniff of that kitty cat? See here, I can make that cat purr…groowwl…you hear me?
- “Accept him, Danita. This is for you,” Hawk insisted, softly… With a moan of acceptance, her body and mind having a tug of war of denial versus hot anticipation, her body won.
- The walls of her pussy grabbed onto his cock desperately, causing flames to shoot electric fire directly from his balls and cock straight to his gut like a bolt of lightning.
- “Please tell me you have a condom,” he pleaded, his breath coming out in harsh gasps… “Yes. Side drawer. Hurry.”
- When she shivered, the smile he gave her before he captured her lips were pure sin.
- Brandan clenched his teeth together, and grunted deep in his throat when her inner walls pulsed on his dick with delicate yet robust ferocity.
you can see why there’s a lot of screaming involved.
Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger
8 – France had two hundred thousand cafes in 1960; by 2008, it was down to forty thousand…
9 – The average meal in France now sped by in thirty-eight minutes, down from eighty-eight minutes a quarter-century ago.
9 – France, in turn, had become its (McDonald’s) second-most-profitable market in the world.
13 – Consider, he (Guy Savoy) said, a freshly caught turbot that has just arrived in the kitchen. “It is a fat, perfect turbot—magnificent to look at, to smell, to touch. It is maybe twenty or thirty years old, with a story of its own. In a matter of minutes, we entirely change its story. We cut it, we season it, we cook it; we instantly turn something that was completely primordial into something refined and sensual; a thing of pleasure. This transformation—for me, that was the magic.”
Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein
4 – …the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and acheivements and the reality is simply grotesque.
5- The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.
7 – Therefore give heed to your clever and patriotic womenfolk and remember that the Capitol of mighty Rome was once saved by the cackling of its faithful geese.
8 – I also believe that a simple and unassuming life is good for everyone…
9 – To inquire after the meaning or object of one’s own existence or that of all creatures has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view.
9 – The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty and Truth.
9 – The trite objects of human efforts—possessions, outward success, luxury—have always seemed to me comtemptible.
9 – I am truly a “lone traveler” and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude—feelings which increase with the years. One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt, such a person loses some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other hand, he is largely independent of opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to build his inner equilibrium upon such insecure foundations.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
257 – Half the time we walk around in love with the idea of a thing instead of the reality of it… You have to pay attention to what’s real, what’s in the world. Not some imaginary alternative, as if it’s a choice we could make.
267 – Hachiko’s story has become widely enough known that strangers passing through Shibuya station recognize him at once… There are stories of people bursting into tears at the sight of the dog sitting and waiting.
387 – …I’m telling you right now I’m not trustworthy. I was once, but not anymore. No promises. Nowadays I’m reckless and unpredictable.
408 – He loved ordinary things, ordinary days, ordinary work.
408 – Myself, I believe in God, but I just don’t want to lose an entire morning at church.
457 – So much of the world was governed by chance.
The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
53 – …she grew into an ordinary, witless woman, trying to find a reason for every calamity and failure, as if the world was explainable and life would have to make sense for one to continue living.
55 – …he was then thirty-two, still too young to understand how limitless men’s desires were, or the absurdity of such greed.
99- …the only way to live on… was to focus on the small patch of life in front of one’s eyes.
99 – Life was unpredictable… and eating and sleeping were among the few things one could rely on to outwit life and its capriciousness.
103 – Seeing is not as good as staying blind…
103 – Why do we have to live without backbones?
106 – There are many ways to know women… Marrying one is the worst among them.
Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg
51 – … and we are free to go about our daily lives, buying cheap and selling dear.
62 – I dig busty women: I often need a soft place to rest my tired head. So often so tired.
114 – The world is a might hymn.
160 – I make lists now of the things I once could do that I can no longer. Inventories of the shrinkage.
161 – I search for the joy that I know lies buried in the awareness of decline.
190 – The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: “Create silence.” (Søren Kierkegaard)
273 – But listen. Listen. I loved you, lady, in my clumsy way. I love you now. And you are lost to me forever.
289 – On some ultimate level I just don’t give a damm at all. That is what I am, I tell myself. This is what I now shall be. If you don’t like it, tough crap. Try to accept me. If you can’t do that, just ignore me.
289 – “As the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into silence. Silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places.” So said Thoreau, in 1849, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
302 – Silence will become my mother tongue. There will be discoveries and revelations, but no upheavals. Perhaps some color will come back into the world for me, later on. Perhaps.
books on telepaths
in the Preface to the 2009 edition of Dying Inside, Robert Silverberg lists these books on telepaths:
The Hampdenshire Wonder by JD Beresford
Odd John and Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
Slan by A.E. van Vogt
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
And these short stories:
The Mindworm by C.M. Kornbluth
Journey’s End by Poul Anderson
Poor Superman by Fritz Leiber
A Vindication of Love
Quotes from reviews of A Vindication of Love:
We have been pragmatic and pedestrian about our erotic lives for too long.
We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked, and emptied of spiritual consequence. We imagine that we live in an erotic culture of unprecedented opportunity when, in fact, we live in an erotic culture that is almost unendurably bland.
I looked for no marriage bond. I never sought anything in you but yourself.
Fuller’s failures are several times more sumptuous than other folks’ successes. And perhaps that is something we need to admit about failure: It can well be more sumptuous than success. . . . Somewhere in our collective unconscious we know — even now — that to have failed is to have lived.
With our cult of success we have all but obliterated the memory that in pain lies grandeur. If the soul is a garden, as Voltaire once suggested, a complete soul will never be spared bitter fruit. For every sweet plum there will be a toxic berry. For every cluster of roses there will be a tangle of thorns.
At its strongest and wildest and most authentic, love is a demon. It is a religion, a high-risk adventure, an act of heroism. Love is ecstasy and injury, transcendence and danger, altruism and excess. In many ways, it is divine madness — and was recognized exactly as that as early as the time of Plato.
Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
3 – …Adelaide is lovely on the inside, and soon the rest of her will catch up.
10 – That was what was so sad and difficult about teaching. Taking attendance, enforcing detention, making them love you, always seemed to come first. Often the period would end before any knowledge could be pursued, as as for her own commitment to intellectual inquiry? She was just too tired, most of the time.
11 – When you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless. . . . But at a certain point, you begin to feel your talents dropping away . . . until one day you realize that you cannot think of a single thing you are wonderful at.
24 – …Ms. Hempel would berate her younger, student self: she never should have turned away from the dark and gleaming surfaces of the lab. She had chosen instead the squishy embrace of the humanities, where nothing was quantified and absolute and now she was paying for all those lovely, lazy years of sitting in circles and talking about novels.
55 – It made her happy that the person she was marrying would commit crimes in the same way as she would.
57 – Everything else seemed easy: the long correspondence, the breaking off with his girlfriend, the bringing together of their two libraries.
102 – When students look at history… they shouldn’t see their own faces; they should see something unfamiliar staring back at them. They should see something utterly strange.
164 – …some agreement was reached between their mother and solitude.
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
34 – There’s always a she. Isn’t there?
41 – …a few white guys with deadened faces, as if they hadn’t been fed enough as babies, had remained stunted and annoyed ever since.
155 – I am the way… I am the light. And I will not bake your fucking pies.
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
21 – In the beginner’s (shoshin) mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.
27 – We must exist right here, right now!
37 – We must make some effort, but we must forget ourselves in the effort we make.
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