Skip to content →

Category: quotes

The Very Mist On The Essex Marsh

Published March 3, 2025 by Warren Ellis

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.

HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad

Essex and the Thames Delta, my life.

Comments closed

The Unknown Soldiers Of The Order Of Speed

Published February 27, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Huh. Apparently I did read MALIGN VELOCITIES some years ago. I wonder why the Kindle marked it as unread? Oh well. Didn’t hurt to read it again.

Paul Virilio draws out a whole genealogy of the celebrants of speed: ‘whether it’s the drop-outs, the beat generation, automobile drivers, migrant workers, tourists, Olympic champions or travel agents, the military-industrial democracies have made every social category, without distinction, into unknown soldiers of the order of speeds’

Comments closed

Alert Until The End Of Time

Published January 29, 2025 by Warren Ellis

The time for sleep was past. We had to be on the alert until the end of time. We were obliged to shoulder American fear, which cooled our solidarity and compassion.

THE YEARS, Annie Ernaux (UK) (US+)

She’s writing about the post 9/11 world here: but with US news flooding the zone with shit, precisely as they are intended to, because after four years they’ve forgotten how this works, it feels apt in new ways today.

Comments closed

The Zone Of The Nameable

Published December 6, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Kafka sensed that by then only the minimum number of elements of the surrounding world ought to be named. He plunged the sharpest Ockham’s razor into the substance of the novel. To name the bare minimum, and in its pure literality. And why so? Because the world was turning back into a primeval forest, too fraught with strange noises and apparitions. Everything had too much power. Thus it became necessary to limit oneself to what lay closest at hand, to circumscribe the zone of the nameable. Then all that power, otherwise diffuse, would be channeled there, and whatever was named—an inn, a file, an office, a room—would fill with unprecedented energy.

K, Roberto Calasso (UK) (US+)

One Comment

Published October 13, 2024 by Warren Ellis

It is interesting that a kind of semi-public notebooking is how my blogging story is wrapping up. A kind of semi-public notebooking is a good description of the original vibe of blogs, circa 2002-09.

But we’ve moved on to a deeper kind of notebooking now (deeper in the sense of much more richly and densely hyperlinked internally). A much deeper kind than blogs can sustain. Deep notebooking and content gardening too, aren’t blogging — and shouldn’t try to be. That would be selling that new medium short.

Hmmm.

Comments closed

As If They Wanted Something From Us

Published August 23, 2024 by Warren Ellis

…even in our totally enlightened world we often encounter images as if they wanted something from us.

ON SLOWNESS, Lutz Koepnick

Comments closed

Bricks

Published June 29, 2024 by Warren Ellis

“From about 11 o’clock in the morning, we’re poring over an exit poll, and from about 12 hours later, we’re shitting bricks as to whether it’s right or not.”

So said Britain’s most trusted elections guru and developer of the UK general election exit poll, John Curtice, in a recent interview with the Guardian.

Comments closed