Tuesday, June 28, 2011
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”
Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” 1966
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
“I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.”
Sam, in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I’m pretty sure these three sentences are what it took Terrence Malick at least 45 minutes of The Tree of Life to suggest.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
“The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.”
Arthur Phillips, The Song is You. Can’t find the quote I wanted to post, but this will do.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
“Y’know, some jobs, you fly, and some, you push the rock up the hill.”
JOHN HAWKES, in an interview at The A.V. Club.
“(Decepticon decapitation happens so often in this film that I will henceforth refer to it as Decepticapitation.) Immediately following the car chase, two Autobots faced off in a Mexican stand-off against two Decepticon punks, and the two Decepticons got killed. I would tell you who the Autobots were, but since every freaking Transformer in these movies just looks like a random pile of digital slop, I’m not even sure this scene actually happened. Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe life is just a dream, BWAAAHHHH.”
Darren Franich, writing for Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch. Spoilers, if you care. What really makes this quote is that BWAAAHHH links to this.
BWAAAHHH.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
“Failure only means that you haven’t thrown yourself, face-first, against the brick wall of probability enough times. And to quit after only one try? That would be committing statistical suicide.”
Alina Simone, “Gloom-deflecting Mailman Warrior Gods,” from You Must Go and Win
Sunday, July 22, 2012
There’s a word for everything
“But—and here is the hope—there is a solution for people of this type, and it’s perhaps not the solution that could have been predicted. The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult. They must work—without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked. And I don’t mean work for its own sake, but they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and lived through the hard work and suffering that inevitably comes with the process.”
— How Should a Person Be?, Sheila Heti
Emphasis mine.
