Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

Matt Groening

I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.

Wow, imagine if that were the case here!

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

I knew it!

To alcohol! The cause of...and solution to...all of life's problems.

Next up: To heroin!

You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is 'never try'.

Sounds like something a cartoon character might advise, doesn't it?

Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known...then went crazy as a loon.

Yo, Lisa!

English? Who needs that? I'm never going to England.

Logic let's call it.

[iambiguous]

David Grann from Killers of the Flower Moon

History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.

Depending on who is writing it of course.

There was one question that the judge and the prosecutors and the defense never asked the jurors but that was central to the proceedings: Would a jury of twelve white men ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian? One skeptical reporter noted, “The attitude of a pioneer cattleman toward the full-blood Indian…is fairly well recognized.” A prominent member of the Osage tribe put the matter more bluntly: “It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder—or merely cruelty to animals.

Let's run this by the most flagrant racists here.

An Indian Affairs agent said, 'The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?'

Cue Hamas and Bibi?

As Sherlock Holmes famously said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Let's try that here. You know, given a particular context.

For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.

Just out of curiosity, did they?

In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the “gods had left confetti.” In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.

Sounds like a movie in the making to me.[

[iambiguous]

God...

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.” Terry Pratchett

Go figure?

“Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves.” Joni Eareckson Tada

Go figure?

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.” Sylvia Plath

And suicide is a sin.

“That wasn't any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.” Stephen King

Next up: how to tell them apart.

“God save us from people who mean well.” Vikram Seth

I wondered if I did.

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” Anne Lamott

Of course, that's now understood in the Holy Land.

[iambiguous]

Existentialism...

“After a while you could get used to anything.” Albert Camus

Really? What about the pinheads here?

“He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Define free, right?

“Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.” Friedrich Nietzsche

With the possible exception of your own?

“The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.” Albert Camus

So, does posting here count?

“If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.” Albert Camus

Unless, of course, he's wrong.

"Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.” José Saramago

See, I told you.

[iambiguous]

Ottessa Moshfegh from My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.

Not counting the Big One perhaps.

The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet.

Wow, neither does mine.

On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

Top that.

I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you'd feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide.

Next up: Conrad Roy and Michelle Carter.

Sometimes I feel dead, I told her, and I hate everybody.

Join the club, right?

Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another.

Not counting the times that's all they have in common.

[iambiguous]

Adam Johnson from The Orphan Master's Son

Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything.

I'll try it anyway: pinheads.

It's called a gui-tar. It's used to perform American rural music. It's said to be especially popular in Texas, he told her. It's also the instrument of choice for playing 'the blues,' which is a form of American music that chronicles the pain caused by poor decision making.

Next up: "the blues" here.

All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.

Here? No way!!

What happened? Buc asked him. I told her the truth about something, Ga answered. You’ve got to stop doing that, Buc said. It’s bad for people’s health.

And, no, not just in North Korea.

Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn’t matter what they were about. It didn’t matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack—if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous.

Next up: the Dear Leader here: https://knowthyself.forumotion.net/

To survive in this world, you got to be many times a coward but at least once a hero.

You know, on average.

[iambiguous]

John Fowles from The French Lieutenant's Woman

Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s Whore.

You know, back when that sort of thing took on a whole different meaning.
Or not of course.

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

Idiocracy! https://youtu.be/gJDcoqrh1ac?si=Vzv0dlR_rORXWcaT

We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.

Let's get back to this in 2123.

You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.

And now he's the fucking king!

You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it.

Let alone it acknowledging you.

But though one may keep the wolves from one’s door, they still howl out there in the darkness.

And the equivalent of that here, of course.

[iambiguous]

Despair...

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.” Mahatma Gandhi

Wow, I'll bet that cheers you up!

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.” T.S. Eliot

Though, sure, for some with a really, really big bang.

“...my beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.” Charles Bukowski

Not sure even I can top that.

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss -- an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. -- is sure to be noticed.” Søren Kierkegaard

I lost my own years and years ago. You can tell, right?

“Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.” Joseph Conrad

Well, actually, it sort of is.

“The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead.” Anne Rice

Let's run that by Eli and Oskar.

[iambiguous]

Suicide...

“There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.” Friedrich Nietzsche

One man's opinion?

“And I do. I do wonder, I think about it all the time. What it would be like to kill myself. Because I never really know, I still can't tell the difference, I'm never quite certain whether or not I'm actually alive. I sit here every single day. Run, I said to myself. Run until your lungs collapse, until the wind whips and snaps at your tattered clothes, until you're a blur that blends into the background.
Run, Juliette, run faster, run until your bones break and your shins split and your muscles atrophy and your heart dies because it was always too big for your chest and it beat too fast for too long and you run.
Run run run until you can't hear their feet behind you. Run until they drop their fists and their shouts dissolve in the air. Run with your eyes open and your mouth shut and dam the river rushing up behind your eyes. Run, Juliette.
Run until you drop dead. Make sure your heart stops before they ever reach you. Before they ever touch you.
Run, I said.” Tahereh Mafi

Next up: Lola: https://youtu.be/XT2RlajsaSQ?si=njQ2QxGAsk5Qi6GL

“What people don't understand about depression is how much it hurts. It's like your brain is convinced that it's dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that's less is a scary hollowness. Your mind fills with dark thoughts; you become convinced that your friends secretly hate you, you're worthless, and then there's no hope. I never got so low as to consider ending it all, but I understand how that can happen to some people. Depression simply hurts too much.” Tyler Hamilton

And how depressing is that?

“How unhappy does one have to be before living seems worse than dying?” Deborah Curtis

On a scale from one to ten, say.
You first.

“Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.” Lauren Oliver

Let's change that.
You first.

“After all, suicide is contagious.” Suzanne Young

But is it contagious enough?

[iambiguous]

Matt Groening

“Where do babies come from? Don't bother asking adults. They lie like pigs. However, diligent independent research and hours of playground consultation have yielded fruitful, if tentative, results. There are several theories. Near as we can figure out, it has something to do with acting ridiculous in the dark. We believe it is similar to dogs when they act peculiar and ride each other. This is called "making love". Careful study of popular song lyrics, advertising catch-lines, TV sitcoms, movies, and T-Shirt inscriptions offers us significant clues as to its nature. Apparently it makes grown-ups insipid and insane. Some graffiti was once observed that said "sex is good". All available evidence, however, points to the contrary.

Fucking, in other words.

Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals ... except the weasel.

Next up [here]: Wiggling out of things.

You can't keep blaming yourself. Just blame yourself once, and move on.

Pick one:
1] Homer
2] Marge
3] Lisa
4] Bart

I plead alignment to the flakes of the untitled snakes of a merry cow and to the republicans for which they scam: one nacho, underpants with licorice and jugs of wine for owls.

Though not until they elect a new Speaker of the House of course.

But we all had an agreement to let each other get away with everything! That's capitalism!

Okay, but only until the wokers of the world unite. Either them or the workers.

When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, here is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.

Just out of curiosity, does that include the authorities here?

[iambiguous]

Umberto Eco from The Name of the Rose

I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?"

Hear! Hear!
Right?

Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him...

Tell that to him though.
But point taken.

A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.

The fool!

In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth...

Got a few of them here then.

But why do some people support the heretics?
Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power.
Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?
That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong.

Pick one:
1] too cynical
2] no where near cynical enough

There was no plot...and I discovered it by mistake.

Okay, but there could still be a plot.

[iambiguous]

Edith Wharton from The Age of Innocence

Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.

The fool!
On the other hand, perhaps, eventually, aren't we all?

...watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favorite sport of the angels, but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell.

You're an angel. Would you watch? Would you chortle?

She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted.

Anyone here recall what that actually was?

She was something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.

She was also Michelle Pfeiffer.

...individual destiny is to a large extent defined, and human potential frequently circumscribed, by social conventions as ephemeral as they are ‘‘inscrutable.”

Actually, she barely scratched the surface.

Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

If you get his drift.
And May does.

[iambiguous]

Junot Díaz from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

On the other hand, it's not called the "fight-or-flight response" for nothing.

It's never the changes we want that change everything.

Of course, someone wanted them.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

Intriguing?

That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.

Of course, he's just paraphrasing this guy: https://youtu.be/VKcAYMb5uk4?si=I3UyLK9fMdGiAb8A

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

Here? Starting now, okay?

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

Come on, that's the one we regret most of all.

[iambiguous]

Alice Walker from The Color Purple

Anyhow, he say, you know how it is. You ask yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. Why us men and women. Where do children really come from. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ask why you here, period. So what you think?

Uh, define think?

One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.

You know, back then?

It had never occurred to me, though when you read the bible it is perfectly plain if you pay attention only to the words. It is the pictures in the bible that fool you. The pictures that illustrate the words. All of the people are white and so you just think all the people from the bible were white too. But really white white people lived somewhere else during those times. That’s why the bible says that Jesus Christ had hair like lamb’s wool. Lamb’s wool is not straight, Celie. It isn’t even curly.

Hair like lamb's wool: Revelation 1:14-15.

When the missionaries got to the part bout Adam and Eve being naked, the Olinka peoples nearly bust out laughing. Especially when the missionaries tried to make them put on clothes because of this. They tried to explain to the missionaries that it was they who put Adam and Eve out of the village because they was naked. Their word for naked is white. But since they are covered by color they are not naked. They said anybody looking at a white person can tell they naked, but black people can not be naked because they can not be white.

Ah, at play in the fields of the Lord.

Can anything be more boring than an upper-class Englishman?

With or without a bullwhip in his hand?

Ain't nothing wrong with Shug Avery. She just sick. Sicker than anybody I ever seen. She sicker than my mama was when she die. But she more evil than my mama and that keep her alive.

Evil, maybe. But then there's all the rest of her.

[iambiguous]

Susanna Clarke from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure --- it is, after all, what everybody does all the time.

Posting here, for example.

To be more precise it was the color of heartache.

Pitch black?

I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.

Idle chatter? Start here: https://ilovephilosophy.com/search.php? ... d=newposts

He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.

Philosophically?

I have been quite put out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it.

Choose among yourselves here and get back to me.

The very shapes of the trees were like frozen screams.

Or weeping willows.