#absurdity

There is small merit in mocking goodness, tweaking charity; it is much more comic to deprive people of their petty little existence for no reason at all, for a lark. ↗

— Jacques Rigaut

#humor #humor

And dying is more natural than living, because what could be more unnatural than that panicstricken thing leaping and falling like a last flame beneath the ribs? ↗

— William Golding

#death #life #naturality #death

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#life #business

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street-corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door. So it is with absurdity. The absurd world more than others derives its nobility from that abject birth. In certain situations, replying “nothing” when asked what one is thinking about may be pretense in a man. Those who are loved are well aware of this. But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity. ↗

— Albert Camus

#the-myth-of-sisyphus #love

Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors... ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#imagination #literary-theories #imagination

No amount of manifest absurdity... could deter those who wanted to believe from believing. ↗

— Bernard Levin

#amount #believe #believing #could #deter

Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there's humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd. ↗

— David Lynch

#absurdity #after #because #becomes #bloody

The proposition that we should encourage wickedness and violence by exposing one side of the face to blows because we have been beaten on the other is too great an absurdity. ↗

— Thomas Mellon

#beaten #because #been #blows #encourage

All non-incumbent campaigns promise hope and change, but Obama took the promise to a new level of absurdity. He suggested that a vote for him would literally transform the Earth. ↗

— John Podhoretz

#campaigns #change #earth #him #hope

To reduce this claim of slavery to an absurdity, it is only necessary to add that there are only two states in which slaves are a majority, and not one in which the slaveholders are not a very disproportionate minority. ↗

— William H. Seward

#add #claim #disproportionate #majority #minority