Quote of the day

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Jeanette Winterson from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it.

See, I told you.

She said she’d often wondered why she wanted to do some things and not do other things at all. Well, it was obvious with some things, but for others, there was no reason there.

Or there are reasons, but the reasons are always wrong.

They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

Next up: they believed in God.

My mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way.

Lots and lots and lots of renditions of that of course.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at until you understood them, they couldn't change halfway through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

But now, as we know, not all words.

If there's such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

Wager, wager, wager.

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Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...

Don't try that with me though.

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

Well, provided you've got one of course.

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.

Let's try that here. Adverbs too.

I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.

In la la land maybe.

Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.

Or just go here: viewtopic.php?t=33261

Atticus said to Jem one day, I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. Your father’s right, she said. Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

Next up: ostriches.

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Cynicism...

“Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.” Joseph Heller

Luck let's call it.
Or payola.

“The fucking world is running out of gas.” John Updike

On the other hand, Rabbit is rich.

“Cynicism places the cynic at the center seat of judgement with the self appointed authority to criticize and condemn. ” Jayce O'Neal

Me, right?

“He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.” Flannery O'Connor

Me too. Though considerably less composed.

“Cynicism is one of the terrible obstacles to progress.” Bryant McGill

Of course, I do what I can.

“He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.” W. Somerset Maugham

Gasp!

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Ernest Becker from The Denial of Death

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

Bifurcated, let's call it.

People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.

Yeah, I tried that once myself.
Not here, of course.

What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms.

That's when God suggested cremation.

Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.

Yo, Maia!

Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.

Yeah, whatever...

The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.

Here, pick one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy[

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Pessimism...

“Exit God, exit religion, exit divine purpose; enter cosmic insignificance, enter universal purposelessness, enter ever-fleeting pleasures and ever-present suffering—life does indeed seem very bleak. No myths, no prophecies, nothing to console the thinking individual. What's left is a heartless, cosmic meat-grinder that is perfectly indifferent to its inhabitants. Without the 'vital lies' we tell ourselves, our lives are utterly useless.” Selim Güre

See, I told you.

“To many, the meaning of life—or lack thereof—is not even an issue. Their meaning is prescribed by the religions to which they subscribe, or one of the secular worldviews they choose for themselves... They have a way of living imposed upon them and seem to be content with a problematic world insofar as it has answers. The destiny of those who think for themselves, on the other hand, is wholly different—usually dramatic." Selim Güre

Though, from time to time, terrifying.

“At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed-a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh." Ernest Becker

And then what we do here.

“There will come a day for each of us, and then for all of us, when the future will be done with. Until then, humanity will acclimate itself to every new horror that comes knocking as it has done from the very beginning.” Thomas Ligotti

Uh, God's will?

"What could I say? That I didn't care about living? That with every day of life more and more is being subtracted from less and less? Minus this second. Minus this second. That I was tired of collecting the millions of minutes, killing the idle thousands of hours?” Jeffrey Moore

And don't get me started on days, weeks, months and years.

“It can really rob you of your faith in the human spirit, sometimes, the internet.” Ellery Lloyd

Some parts...

https://ilovephilosophy.com/index.php
https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora

...more than others.

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Cormac McCarthy from The Passenger

He knew that he should wonder what was to become of him.

But he posted here anyway.

Information and survival will ultimately be the same thing.

Also, our information or their information?

What’s in a shadow? Do they move along at the speed of the light that casts them? How deep do they get?

You take that one.

They’re not any smarter than they have to be and they’re just as smart as they need to be.

Well, that sure explains a lot. About some things anyway.
Uh, posting here?

What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations.

And how, say, ironic is that?

If I could plan my life I wouldnt want to live it.

And now it's too late anyway.

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Stupidity...

“To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.” Charles Baudelaire

Yes, even virtual stupidity.

“The earth is a great piece of stupidity.” Victor Hugo

Yes, including virtual stupidity.

"Look. You think how stupid people are most of the time. Old men drink. Women at a village fair. Boys throwing stones at birds. Life. The foolishness and the vanity, the selfishness and the waste. The pettiness, the silliness. You think in war it must be different. Must be better. With death around the corner, men united against hardship, the cunning of the enemy, people must think harder, faster, be...better. Be heroic.
Only it's just the same. In fact do you know, because of all that pressure, and worry, and fear, it's worse. There aren't many men who think clearest when the stakes are highest. So people are even stupider in war than the rest of the time. Thinking about how they'll dodge the blame, or grab the glory, or save their skins, rather than about what will actually work. There's no job that forgives stupidity more than soldiering. No job that encourages it more.” Joe Abercrombie

True. I was once a soldier myself. Though we lost that war being led by "the best and the brightest".

“If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow.” Jane Austen

Hint, hint.

“When you're surrounded by stupidity, self-preservation isn't a sin." Meljean Brook

I know, I know: what am I still doing here then?

“Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.” George Eliot

Next up: "Dangling Conversations" and the pinheads here.

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Emil M. Cioran from The Temptation to Exist

Having discovered, at the end of her efforts, the realm of non-will, she rejoices, for she knows now that her ruin conceals a pleasure principle, and she intends to profit by it. Abandonment enchants and fulfills her. Time continues to pass? She is not at all alarmed; let others bother about time; it is their business: they do not guess what relief there can be in wallowing in a present that leads nowhere …

Trust me: this is harder than you think.

For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

You detail yours, I'll detail mine.

The man too lucid to worship will also be too lucid to wreck, or will wreck only his rebellions; for what is the use of rebelling only to discover, afterwards, a universe intact? A paltry monologue.

You detail yours, I'll detail mine.

Bluntly: my rebellion is a faith to which I subscribe without believing in it.

Don't try this at home.

A genre becomes universal when it seduces minds which have no reason to embrace it.

Well, that leaves mine out.
I'm proud to say.

If the Jews have not inflicted Him upon us, they nevertheless bear the responsibility of having conceived Him. That is a flaw in their genius. They could have done better.

Cue Jesus Christ, right IC?

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Mary Roach from Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let's squander some on Mars.

Talk about cynical!

Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.

Let's draw a new one.

He has a minor in explosives and the slightly bitter, misanthropic personality of someone who shouldn't.

Not many that doesn't describe.

People can't anticipate how much they'll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense 'periscope liberty'- a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. 'A baby!' he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran.

You tell me.

No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size.

No one here either. As far as I know.

Upon the occasion of history's first manned flight -- in the 1780's aboard the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloons -- someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. What use, he replied, is a newborn baby?

So, would you go that far?

[Sculptor]

Mary Roach from Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

Yes, the money could be better spent on Earth. But would it? Since when has money saved by government redlining been spent on education and cancer research? It is always squandered. Let's squander some on Mars.

BS

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John N. Gray from Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

Today we have made a fetish of choice; but a chosen death is forbidden. Perhaps what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans have learnt to cling more abjectly to life.

So, how abjectly do you cling to it?

If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself.

Didn't I tell you?

In Europe and Japan, bourgeois life lingers on. In Britain and America it has become the stuff of theme parks.

No, really:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_a ... e_Americas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_a ... ed_Kingdom

Genocide is as human as art or prayer.

Actually, I wouldn't go this far myself.

The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals.

See, didn't Satyr tell you?

'If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,' the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said.
'It's clear that Wittgenstein hadn't spent much time with lions,' commented the gambler and conservationist John Aspinall.

Let's resolve this.
You know, philosophically.

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Jeanette Winterson from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.

And, of course, coming here doesn't help.

I did upset the children. Not intentionally, but effectively.

Whatever works.

I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

Nope, nobody like that here. So far.

The woman tried to teach Winnet her language, and Winnet learned the words but not the language.

And the equivalent of that there, of course.

Whelks are strange and comforting.
They have no notion of community life and they breed very quietly.
But they have a strong sense of personal dignity.
Even lying face down in a tray of vinegar there is something noble about a whelk.
Which cannot be said for everybody.

You tell me: https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=5 ... =625&dpr=1

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.

Yep, dasein.

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Harper Lee from To Kill a Mockingbird

As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash

Let's run that by these folks: https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.

Let's run that by, oh, I don't know, henry quack?

With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.

Nope, never found anyone like that myself.

You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don't you let 'em get your goat. Try fightin' with your head for a change.

Not counting the pinheads here of course.

Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.

Well, sometimes it is.

If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time. It's because he wants to stay inside.

And you're in there with him or you ain't.

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Cynicism...

“You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they've discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction -- the wisecrack." W. Somerset Maugham

Let's name names.

“Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.” Kingsley Amis

Jake would be bawling here.

"Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.” Bergen Evans

Though hardly ever tolerable enough.

“Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand." M. John Harrison

Any Earth-humans here?

“Barbara Tuchman draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.” Robert K. Massie

Both have always worked for me.

“While skepticism is healthy, cynicism, real cynicism, is toxic.” John Oliver

I know that mine is.

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Hermann Hesse from Steppenwolf

His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.

Me? hundreds and hundreds tops.

The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.

Not including all of the countless exceptions, of course..

A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life.

Yeah, I remember that myself.

Now true humor begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously.

Har Har Harr?

Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.

And then there's my own rendition of that, right?

Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty.

On the other hand, who had ever asked to be born?