Springtime always reminds me of how dead I am inside.
— Dorothy Parker (via larmoyante)
oldhollywood: “My trouble is that I try to cover a part entirely. When you do there’s the danger that the patron will leave the theatre feeling that you are so perfectly suited to the character he has just seen that he can’t imagine you in any other part.
…Mothers with children ran from me in the street. Terrible letters came to me. Letters came from strange people; people who I never believed lived in the world; depraved and disturbed minds, thinking they saw in me the perfect companion, a fellow psychopathic. A success can be too great, I tell you.”
-Peter Lorre, on his role in 1931’s M
(via)
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (via larmoyante)
This is an adolescent fantasy, that no one is like you, no one else’s inner life is as rich as yours, no one else wants and feels and dreams and struggles like you do. Either the world is full of minimal people, or imagining others as minimal is a strategy for survival. Someone else’s capacities are a terrifying possibility—what they could open, what they could overwhelm—and we each have the power to believe in them or not.
And the hippies are jingling, jangling, blowing smoke all over Haight Ashbury, and they were letting their hair grow long. To the male Indian, this was a phenomenon, because for an Indian to grow his hair long was a violation of federal policy of 1906. According to the 1906 policy, food was withheld until compliance—in other words (by terms of this policy), we could be starved to death until we cut our hair.
— Adam Fortunate Eagle (Red Lake Chippewa)
(Source: emeraldtriangleprincess)
Marianne Moore
(Source: scriabinist)
Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to “make a difference” trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don’t always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved. If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.
Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, via
A poet friend of mine explained my predicament rather vaguely by saying that ‘I was trying to find myself’. He may have been right. But if so, who is this self? Where shall I discover him amongst the many who cross my path, and by what sign shall he be known to me?
— Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938) in A Journey Round My Skull, subject of this months NYRB Salon at Dog Eared Books. (via harmlessbalderdash)
As long as you are not defined by software, you are helping to broaden the identity of the ideas that will get locked in for future generations. In most arenas of human expression, it’s fine for the person to love the medium they are given to work in. Love paint if you are a painter; love a clarinet if you are a musician. Love the English language (or hate it). Love of these things is a love of mystery.
But in the case of digital creative materials…it’s a good idea to be skeptical. These designs came together very recently, and there’s a haphazard, accidental quality to them. Resist the easy grooves they guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger that you will become entrapped in some else’s recent careless thoughts.
— Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget, 2010
