Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (Author's Note)
Labels: quote
Life demands suicide, but that's already been taken care of for us, and there's no rush.
Labels: thought
The problem with dictators lies not in what they do: some make trains run on time, and some start wars, and some do neither and some do both, but it would be fruitless to rank them on this basis. The problem is not which groups they victimise—though it is a problem that it will always be somebody, the cornerstone of control being to divide and scapegoat. The problem is not even that strongmen can’t get on with each other, for all the anxiety it brings, waiting for the inevitable confrontation as one immovable, volatile autocrat comes head to head with another.
No, the problem is that the power annexed by one big daddy hasn’t come from nowhere: it is power surrendered by everyone else, whose human destiny is then smothered by their political impotence. Whether you are explicitly denied the vote or simply rendered irrelevant by a winner-takes-all authoritarianism, you are left infantilised and directionless.
Zoe Williams
Labels: quote
Those who try to assure us that the emergency is not an emergency, or to insist that the enduring institutions of democracy will surely triumph over this mass hallucination, are either cowardly or stupid or have their heads buried somewhere that isn’t the sand. Furthermore, they haven’t been paying attention: Aren’t these the same responsible grownups who understood how things worked in the real world, and who felt sure that Jeb Bush would be the Republican nominee, and that Hillary Clinton would win the election in a historic landslide? At some point, clinging to your broken idols while barbarians ransack the temple just becomes pathetic.
Andrew O'Hehir
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The questions that matter the most, to us,
Labels: thought
The lovely American confidence that "everything will be all right" has itself now become a serious danger to everything being all right.
David Frum
Labels: quote
Closure, no matter how satisfying, is always accompanied by a bit of disappointment. We long for openness, for possibility. We want to continue.
Labels: thought
Knowledge, and especially disagreeable knowledge, cannot by any art be totally excluded even from those who do not seek it. Wisdom, said Aeschylus long ago, comes to men whether they will or no. The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall; and it is surely truer prudence to move our furniture betimes into the open air than to stay indoors until our tenement tumbles about our ears. It is and it must in the long run be better for a man to see things as they are than to be ignorant of them.
A. E. Housman
Labels: quote
Everyone is entitled to leave something behind for time to lose or destroy.
Labels: thought
"Now I just want to give you folks a few reasons why you can trust this church," he said. "In the first place, friends, you can rely on it that it's nothing foreign connected with it. You don't have to believe nothing you don't understand and approve of. If you don't understand it, it ain't true, and that's all there is to it."
"This church is up-to-date! When you're in this church you can know that there's nothing or nobody ahead of you, nobody knows nothing you don't know, all the cards are on the table, friends, and that's a fack!"
Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
Labels: quote
When my work is not good, when it's not interesting, be sure that it's always interesting to me.
Labels: thought
A vision rose up before him. It was Cacotopia, suddenly, all around him, a land of nightsoil swept over by aboriginal winds and lit by a dim moronic moon under which, songless and illiberal, the only tribe of humans left on earth sat around shouting and mocking all that language could, a cultureless people who, having looked back into the past, saw there was no future. Agitprop throttled fable, libraries had been torched, and in the rubble of what once was were enacted scenes better imagined than described, with words, no longer lovely magical influences on nature anymore but now bleats of perversion serving only as a means of evil report, slander, strife, and quarrel.
The final day of pollution had come, and everywhere crowds of the disaffected gathered together in an earsplitting din to smash printing-presses, incinerate books, and befoul manuscripts in an orgy of violence, with everyone spitting, shitting, and bouncing up and down on his heels. Impatience was upon them! Where can we go, they screamed, never to hear or read a word again? They clapped in chant to be led somewhere. But where, where?
Suddenly, political sucksters and realistic insectivores, shoving to the front, puffed up their stomachs and blew lies out of their fingers! A parade was formed! It was now an assembly on the march, an enthusiastic troop of dunces, pasquil-makers, populist scribblers and lick-penny poets, anti-intellectual hacks, modernistic rubbishmongers, anonymuncules of prose and anacreontic water-bibbers all screaming nonce-words and squealing filthy ditties. They shouted scurrilities! They pronounced words backwards! They tumbled along waggling codpieces, shaking hogs' bladders, and bugling from the fundament! Some sang, shrill, purposely mispronouncing words, snarping at the language to mock it while thumping each other with huge rubber phalluses and roaring out farts! They snapped pens in half and turned somersaults with quills in their ears to make each other laugh, lest they speak and then finally came to the lip of a monstrously large hole, a crater-like opening miles wide, which, pushing and shoving, they circled in an obscene dance while dressed in hoods with long earpieces and shaking firebrands, clackers, and discordant bells! A bonfire was then lit under a huge pole, and on that pole a huge banner, to hysterical applause, was suddenly unfurled and upon it, upsidedown, were written the words: "In the End Was Wordlessness."
Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat
Labels: quote
Kakistocracy: government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.
Labels: miscellaneous
A little steam melts a larger quantity of frost, but enough frost freezes steam.
Labels: thought
I have to admit to being an elitist, I'm sorry. You know, one of the few things you can be arrested for is being an elitist. You can run around the street saying God is dead, and people won't like you, but you're not going to be hated. You can preach the violent overthrow of McDonald's and you'll get away with it, but all you have to say is that, in fact, there are some people who are better than others, and it has nothing to do with race or ethnic background or color or anything like that. What it has to do with is who's got the brains.
Harlan Ellison
What's wrong with being elitist, if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive? I'm very, very keen that people should raise their game rather than the other way around.
Richard Dawkins
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There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything.
James Hilton
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The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.
J. G. Ballard
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1) Some things you can't come back from, no matter how resilient.
Labels: miscellaneous
We must believe that most living things are exemplars only, because were they individuals, did they matter as individuals, existence would be a horror. Whether we are justified in this belief, however, is far from certain.
Labels: thought
What I want to do is shout. Happiness? No.
Outrage? No. What I want to do is shout
because we were all wrong, because the point
was not the point, because the world, or what
we took for the world, is breaking, breaking. We were wrong
and are not right. Break! Break! We are here!
What I want to do is shout! Break! Shout!
William Bronk, "The Outcry"
Labels: poetry
It's a mystery to me how so many can so long clutch at and cling to an inferior myth under a deluge of better and better stories.
Labels: thought
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Michael C. Rush (aka M. C. Rush)
Direct inquires to: rushmc @ webnesia.com
(Site was originally called @ Wit's End, then
The Shattered Mirror, before becoming Webnesia.)
