Category: quotes

“I can tell you this. Whatever is going on, it has crushed our technology. The word itself seems outdated to me, lost in space. Where is the leap of authority to our secure devices, our encryption capacities, our tweets, trolls and bots. Is everything in the datasphere subject to distortion and theft? And do we simply have to sit here and mourn our fate?”

THE SILENCE, Don DeLillo (UK) (US)

Also:

“The world is everything, the individual nothing. Do we all understand that?”

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One of Putin’s instructors criticized Putin for his “lowered sense of danger”—a serious flaw for a potential spy.

The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, Masha Gessen (UK) (US)

Also from that book, which I read in 2017:

Putin claims not to have taken part in anti-dissident work but has shown in interviews that he was thoroughly familiar with the way it was organized, probably because he was lying about not having done it.

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Fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

— David Simon

(I’m always losing this quote, so am preserving it here)

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“What is that stuff he’s saying?” Serge asks Laura. “It’s from the Egyptian Book of the Dead,” she replies, hand pressed to her forehead as though this action alone allowed her to think. “ ‘The Book of Stepping Forth by Daylight,’ in fact, if I recognise this passage rightly.” “First thing ever written for a dead readership,” mutters Alby.

C, Tom McCarthy (UK) (US)

I appear to have made a note next to this quote on my Kindle: first thing, but not the bloody last.

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(Del) Close’s Prankster credentials were impeccable. He’d signed up for official LSD tests in Brooklyn in the late 1950s as part of the air force’s preparation for the Mercury space programme (when he pulled out, he claimed the authorities wrote to him saying, ‘Dear Mr Close. You still owe us one dream’).

PSYCHEDELIA AND OTHER COLOURS, Rob Chapman (UK) (US)

(I first learned Del Close’s name when he became a comics writer, creating the anthology series WASTELAND alongside John Ostrander. A very weird way into a very weird life.)

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People had to be careful when talking, since the bear could hear everything said about it, even when it was far away. Even when it retired into its den, even when it was asleep, the bear carried on following what was happening in the world. “The earth is the ear of a bear,” people said.

THE CELESTIAL HUNTER, Roberto Calasso (UK) (US)

Also from that very quotable book:

The first divine being whose name it was forbidden to mention was the bear. In this respect monotheism was not an innovation but a revival, a hardening.

And:

“The biggest danger in life is that the food of humans is all made of souls.”

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And on winter days in Giza, it is often possible to see the sun breaking through the clouds and shining down at the same angle as the pyramids: a stairway to heaven, formed by the rays of the sun on which the king, ‘nimble and wise, could ascend to the indestructible stars.’

From In Search Of The First Civilizations by Michael Wood (UK) (US)

At least one source has the last line as part of an alternate translation of, and I love this terminology, Spell 269 of the Pyramid Texts.

The “indestructible stars” phrase is said to refer to two circumpolar stars, Mizar and Kochab, which, due to their position, seem never to set; and that the angles of pyramids aim at the space they occupy, for it surely had to be heaven.

No matter what happened on Earth, there were still ways to walk on sunlight to the indestructible stars.

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To be stung by the gods is to be intoxicated with lies, stories, possibilities that may never be realized. But, as Socrates says, “Madness that comes from a god is superior to sanity, which is of human origin.”

The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève, Jeff Love (UK) (US)

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Which I was reminded of by this morning’s notes:

‘We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to seek for the truth?’

– The ‘pagan’ author Symmachus

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey  (UK) (US)

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….Flaubert acknowledged in Madame Bovary: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction, Stephen Kern (UK) (US)

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