Category: quotes

There is evidence that the Swedish ‘Stora Kopparberg’ (Great Copper Mountain) company had issued shares in 1288, but the first charted joint stock company is usual seen as the English ‘Muscovy Company’ in 1555. (It was originally founded four years earlier, as the deliciously named ‘Mystery and Company of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places Unknown’.)

Daniel Defoe and the Bank of England: The Dark Arts of Projectors, Valerie Hamilton and Martin Parker (UK) (US)

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Reality as refuge. You take shelter in reality to stop people hassling you on Twitter.

As I was falling asleep, the thought came to mind: ‘I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook.’

…a news item about the fact that one tenth of the earth’s surface has been constantly on fire, through no fault of human beings, for more than two hundred years. A look at a dynamic map of all the fires currently raging on the planet would reveal a multitude of these expanding red zones… I found it startling to consider that our human modernity had developed side by side with this incandescent presence.

…Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, the second largest and second deepest lake on the planet. ‘So deep,’ he said, ‘that there’s no oxygen in the waters at the very bottom. They’re fossil waters.’

Various pieces of THE THINGS WE’VE SEEN, Agustín Fernández Mallo (UK) (US)

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…one day he realized the app he had downloaded onto his iPhone, which caused a man’s voice, every hour, to announce the correct time while weeping, wasn’t going to help him…

BARON WENCKHEIM’S HOMECOMING, Laszlo Krasznahorkai (UK) (US)

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The world of psychological warfare of which SCL was a part has been around for as long as humans have waged war. In the sixth century bc, Persians of the Achaemenid, knowing that Egyptians worshipped the cat god Bastet, drew images of cats on their shields so the Egyptians would be reluctant to take aim at them. Ivan the Terrible cowed the masses into submission by setting up giant frying pans on Red Square and roasting his enemies alive.

Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World, Christopher Wylie (UK) (US)

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Alfred Kazin relates that Thomas Mann lent one of Kafka’s novels to Einstein, who gave it back to him saying: “I couldn’t read it; the human mind isn’t that complex.”

SIX WALKS IN THE FICTIONAL WOODS, Umberto Eco (UK) (US)

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“During the prolonged applause when the curtain fell, one did ungratefully feel that one was watching a jet-propelled vampire take a bow, surrounded by the pale husks of his victims.”

Orson Welles, Volume 3: One-Man Band (Orson Welles Biographies Book 5)
Simon Callow

(UK) (US)

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Jack Pritchard alleged that it was Betjeman who took (Hungarian-born Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy) to a party ‘at the end of which he said to the hostess in his strange pronunciation; “Thank you for your hostilities.” She was a little taken aback, and when Moholy told John Betjeman what had happened, Betjeman said: “oh don’t worry – she is hostile to everyone.”’

From Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus, Fiona MacCarthy (UK) (US)

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“Increasingly irritated by their attitude, halfway through the first movement, he rapped his baton furiously, raised his hands in the air and said words to the effect of, ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing. You’re supposed to be the finest orchestra in Britain, and you’re playing like a bunch of cunts. Quite frankly, with the way it’s going, you’re not fit to be on stage with these guys, so pick yourself up and let’s hear some bollocks. We’re going to make history tonight, so we might as well make music while we’re doing it.’”

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The incidental resemblance to or concurrence with reality of any of the characters, names, and locations in this novel are exclusively due to wretched happenstance, and in no way express the intention of the author.

— Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, Laszlo Krasznahorkai

(I’m reading a lot of Krasznahorkai again, so maybe this should be a blogchain. We’ll see. I spent last night marking up his Paris Review interview.)

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It was the sixties, a woman said on the radio, and I decided to drop out, really drop out. I went down to Sears and bought me a sleeping bag, a camp stove, some heavy boots. Gave everything else away to friends. Then I hitched out to the middle of Montana with everything I owned stuffed into a backpack. Found this neat cave. Moved in. Lived there four days in absolute, wonderful solitude; and on the fifth day the bear came back.

DEATH WILL HAVE YOUR EYES, James Sallis

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