The Who Quotes (page 36)
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The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. […]
After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn’t slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the...
Fernando Pessoa
The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool...
Steven Pinker
the other guineahen
died of a broken heart and we came to New York.
I used to sit at a table, drawing wings
with a pencil that kept breaking and i kept
remembering how your mind looked when it slept
for several years, to wake up asking why.
So then you turned into a photograph
of somebody who’s trying not to laugh
at somebody who’s trying not to cry
E. E. Cummings
The artist usually sets out -- or used to -- to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
David Herbert Lawrence
The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, - the very stuff of inconstancy, - the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, - and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence.
Salman Rushdie
The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flneur finds the world 'picturesque.
Susan Sontag
The dove descending breaks the air. With flame of incandescent terror. Of which the tongues declare. The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair. Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-To be redeemed from fire by fire. Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name. Behind the hands that wove. The intolerable shirt of flame. Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire. Consumed by either fire or fire.
T. S. Eliot
