If we are literal about the matter, every word we use is a quote. We are all plagiarists. Unless we invent a word. And even then the meaning we ascribe to it is composed of other words which are not our own. Languages are learned. We come hard-wired but we must make an effort to learn the the ways in which words work.
The title for this entry is, of course, a quote (Kathy Acker), but the word "quote" itself has been inspired by a long running thread on a website I have found invaluable for great and free advice on virtually any topic: quora.com. For those who have followed my suggestions over the last few weeks virtually everyone has found something worthwhile or enlightening and in a few case life-changing. No money.No tricks. Just intellectual exchange
I If you have read my blog so far you will hear many echoes here. Or that is my hope. Some might call what follows creative non-fiction. Others an homage to David Markson. And still others a mishmashed jumble. You decide and you create your own connections.You have no other choice.
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| Tennyson |
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
Flannery O'Connor
All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach, and ostensible pinning down of an ostensible object.
Franz Kafka
He thought: What is, is what can be perceived. Reality is only made of pure experience. The brain can hold the sky because it can beget the soul, and when the soul is born, a universe is delivered.
Guillio Tononi
And this grey spirit, yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The gravamen of Mr. Harden's J'accuse is that by tacitly sanctioning this carnival of genitilia, and tut-tutting that "kids will be kids," Yale has lost its sense of moral purpose and is adrift, anchorless in a sea of political correctness, relativism, and diversity.
Christopher Buckley
Nearby, two men, one black and one white, sat together, dressed in identical white thobes. Alan's guidebook told him there was a pronounced, even naked racism in Saudi Arabia, but here was this. Perhaps not evidence of societal harmony, but still. He could not think of an instance when a custom or dictum described in a guidebook had ever been borne out in practice. Conveying cultural norms was like reporting traffic conditions. By the time you published them they were irrelevant.
David Eggars
Your truth, My Truth. So many Truths pressing against us that if we absolutely reconsider what's at stake, our own Truth inevitably swells and swells, fatter and fatter, until we're almost sick with what we contain. No, says the United Self. No, says the tenets of the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop. No, says the Right and the Wrong, the Spoken and the Unspoken, the In and the Out, the I exist and the you're not here.So large with life that we can't help but blow from the pressure of holding so much in, exploding onto the page in fragments.
Which feels just about right to me.
Paul Lisicky
Something that can't go on forever, won't.
Herbert Stein
So how is it then that we can have a book that, on the one hand, is resolutely aesthetically ambitious, as ambitious aesthetically as Infinite Jest is, but which also seems to have political imagination at its core and the ambition to say something politically about where we are in the united Stats and in the capitalist West?
Rick Moody
The rules helped employees avoid the paralysis that often strikes when people confront too many alternatives.
Donal Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt
The misconception: You believe your opinions and decisions are based on experience and facts, while those who disagree with you are falling for the lies and propaganda you don't trust.
The truth: Everyone believes the people they disagree with are gullible, and everyone believes they are far less susceptible to persuasion than they truly are.
David McCraney
Of course, I am a creative nonfiction writer, "creative" being indicative of the style in which nonfiction is written so as to make it dramatic and more compelling. We embrace many of the techniques of the fiction writer including dialogue, description, plot intimacy and specificity of detail, characterization, point of view; except, because it is nonfiction--and this is the difference--it is true.
Lee Gutkind
Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which promises great things.
Richard Rorty
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life--its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness--conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.
Susan Sontag
Other letters reminded me, for example, of Donald Even's epic project, an enchantingly evocative and spectacularly executed philately of an entirely imaginary alternative world.
Lawrence Weschler
The case allows us to separate sentences and phrases which are truly created from those which are merely routine and those squeezed out of daily life like the juice of a lime, however customary, from those which are tongued or sung or spelled or recited.
William Gass
This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundary between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show, the falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of "fullness," of horror vacui.
Umberto Eco
This scramble at the tail end of the admissions calender seldom got much scrutiny from the public, but it was critically important to the universities involved. The fact was that once an offer of admission had been made, the entire game changed and the roles reversed: now the school was the one on bended knee. having gone to the trouble of winnowing the stupendously remarkable from a field of the only normally remarkable, Princeton did not want to lose that stupendously remarkable student to Stanford. Or Harvard. Or--gnashing of teeth--Yale.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
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| Umberto Eco |
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