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I see blond heads and lean jaws and bowlegged swaggers and biceps with veins in them. I see so many calm, impassive, or cheerful faces, faces at peace, for now and always, with the context of their own appearance and being, that sort of long-term peace and smooth acquaintance with invariable destiny that renders the faces bloodlessly passable onto cut-outs of corporate directors in oak-lined boardrooms, professors with plaid ties and leather patches at the elbows of their sport jackets, doctors on bright putting greens with heavy gold shock-resistant watches at their wrists and tiny beepers at their belts, black-jacketed soldiers efficiently bayoneting the infirm. I see Best faces, faces I remember well. Faces whose owners are going to be the Very Best.

— David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

#David Foster Wallace

It is strange. You arrive in a city by night, and staring down from a hotel balcony on its light-glazed streets, looking more secret and seductive than they will by day, you wonder how you will ever decipher it. But within a morning the puzzle unravels with desanctifying speed. A few hours' walk locates the main avenues, elicits a conversation or two, uncovers a mood, and you return to a hotel longer swimming among mapless lights and possibilities, but anchored, gray and unlovely, on the corner of Gogol and Krasin streets.

Colin Thubron, The Lost Heart of Asia

#Colin Thubron #travel

When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

#Marilynne Robinson #love

“I mourn the retreat into the Self and the decline of the broad-canvas novel for the same reason I mourn the rise of suburbs: I like maximum diversity and contrast packed into a single exciting experience.”

Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

#Jonathan Franzen #suburbia

Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both.

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

#jennifer egan #desire

According to the Sufis, God’s very essence—God’s substance—is love. Love is the agent of creation. Sufism does not allow for the concept of creation ex nihilo because, before there was anything, there was love: that is, God loving God’s self in the primordial state of unity. It was only when God desired to express this love to an “other” that humanity was created in the image of the Divine. Humanity, then, is God made manifest; it is God objectified through love.

Reza Aslan, No god but God

#Reza Aslan #Islam #Sufism #love

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.

— Charles Baudelaire as translated by Louis Simpson

#Charles Baudelaire #drinking

Mantell was a lanky assemblage of shortcomings [...].

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

#bill bryson

I remember well and not fondly the black graniteware kettle rattling and steaming on the electric stove, every surface given over to widemouthed jars into which, sweating and impatient, my young mother—a math major, one of three women to graduate from her law school class in 1964—funneled apricots and cherries and plums and tomatoes so I could come home from school and pop open a jar of golden peaches for a snack. They were delicious, but when I think about it now, it seems almost tragic, a sacrifice of time and youth and spirit when we would have grown up just fine eating Del Monte. Everyone I knew who ate Del Monte and Wonder bread and Skippy and Pringles turned out okay. I see these people around town all the time.

Jennifer Reese, Make the Bread, Buy the Butter

#Jennifer Reese #food

Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provides a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence. Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river. Rather, sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when sacred and genuine history collide that religions are born. The clash of monotheisms occurs when faith, which is mysterious and ineffable and which eschews all categorizations, becomes entangled in the gnarled branches of religion.

Reza Aslan, No god but God

#Reza Aslan #religion #Islam

It is curious how I have begun to discern patterns, motifs that somehow had no significance for me at the time. As I view once more the many fragments of this encounter, as I touch them, turn them around, I find myself subject to sudden, illuminated moments. Meeting at the station, for instance, I had never really considered that. But then I remember that Dean, having left college the first time, spent six months in travel, driving ot Mexico and then on to California, the legendary coast. And I think of the very symbol of his existence which continually appears and reappears to me, emerging from behind the trees in the dusk, its lights floating out, its dark shape fleeing along the road, that great, spectral car which haunts the villages, its tires worn, the chrome on its wheels beginning to speckle with rust. Journeys and intimations of journeys--I see now that he has always kept himself close to the life that flows, its transient, borne away. And I see his whole appearance differently. He is joined to the brevity of things. He has apprehended at least one great law.

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

#James Salter #travel

Anne-Marie sits quietly and as Dean talks, becoming drunker, his mouth wetting, I try to watch her, to isolate elements of that stunning sexuality, but it’s like memorizing the reflections of a diamond. The slightest movement and an entirely different brilliance appears. Of course, it is her face I am searching, her gestures, her expression. I am interested in the visible. I know quite well what us the source of all her power, but I am trying to identify it by the most commonplace details.

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

#James Salter

The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe’s “conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action”; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual’s personal salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of “personal salvation”; he doesn’t care enough for people to be “corrupted” for them.

Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

#Saul Alinsky #conscience #community organizing

"[…] It’s a funny thing, Doc. You don’t believe in the cause, and you’ll probably be the last man to stick. I don’t get you at all.”

“I don’t get myself,” Doc said softly. “I don’t believe in the cause, but I believe in men.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just believe they’re men, and not animals. Maybe if I went into a kennel and the dogs were hungry and sick and dirty, and maybe if I could help these dogs, I would. Wouldn’t be their fault they were that way. You couldn’t say, ‘Those dogs are that way because they haven’t any ambition. They don’t save their bones. Dogs are always that way.’ No, you’d try to clean them up and feed them. I guess that’s the way it is with me. I have some skill in helping men, and when I see some who need help, I just do it. I don’t think about it much. If a painter saw a piece of canvas, and he had colors, well, he’d want to paint on it. He wouldn’t figure why he wanted to.”

“Sure, I get you. In one way it seems cold-blooded, standing aside and looking down on men like that, and never getting yourself mixed up with them; but another way, Doc, it seems fine as the devil, and clean.

— John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle

#John Steinbeck #community organizing

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage would with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring rods to prove himself 'superior'.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

#Virginia Woolf

[F]iction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own"

#Virginia Woolf #writing

The bad guys in Lynch movies are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully present at the evilest moments, and this in turn is because they are not only actuated by evil but literally inspired: they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person and if the feelings are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the audience, it’s not because Lynch is “endorsing” or “romanticizing” evil but because he’s diagnosing it — diagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgment of the fact that one reason why evil is so powerful is that it’s hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.

David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch keeps his head” from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

#David Foster Wallace #David Lynch

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