June 2012
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The Internet is one more electronic craze that market forces will sooner or...
– Simon Jenkins, The Times, January 4, 1997.
May 2012
29 posts
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[Plastic] is the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic.
– Roland Barthes, Mythologies.
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If you love someone with dark skin, white
skin looks drained of something...
– Jennifer Egan, Black Box, a story in Twitter.
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Those who suffer chronic boredom do so because they can’t transcend the...
– This is what I think Jonathan Franzen meant when he diagnosed David Foster Wallace’s death as one that was caused by “boredom”.
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[…] Just stretches on and off, right out onto blankness.
– Description of South Dakota, in This Will Be Difficult to Explain And Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud.
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I wanted to work out a trade with things that aren’t alive but...
– Leo Auberg, the narrator in Herta Muller’s new novel, The Hunger AngelĀ
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Desire is democratic; we fall for the wrong people, across age, class, color,...
– Jeanette Winterson, review of John Irving’s new novel, In One Person.
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I don’t think that mumbling, swearing and punctuating one’s...
– Anon.
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Talk is not cheap, and silence is not golden.
– Newt Gingrich, who charges astronomical fees for his speeches.
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The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic...
– Boris Pasternak
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April 2012
9 posts
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The real is imagined, just as the imagined is real.
– Clifford Geertz (he meant, perhaps that fiction and non-fiction are double-helixed)
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Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
– Horace Mann, in a commencement speech delivered to Antioch college graduates, class of 1859.
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Nobody has ever choked swallowing pride yet swallowing pride is something so...
March 2012
38 posts
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To be in debt is to remain awake.
– (Ominous) last line in Sophie Cabot Black’s poem, Somewhere in New Jersey is the Center.
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Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of...
– Khalil Gibran
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Intimacy is something that causes an errection of the heart.
– David Foster Wallace
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One of the core assumptions of LGBT activism, anti-racism work, and other...
– “Is It Fair to Punish Dharun Ravi because Tyler Clementi Died?” Newsweek
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Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me […] But they...
– Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, at the “Women in the World Summit” at Lincoln Center, March 11, 2012.
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Heaven and earth are [only] three feet apart.
– An old Celtic saying.