#absurdity

If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean—even if it did build muscle—whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#conundrums #desire #groundhog-day #life #money

Annihilation is an absurdity in terms. ↗

— Bernard Palissy

#annihilation #terms

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#age #air #before #begin #constantly

I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed "Bible communists" before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry, not to mention harboring their most infamous resident, an irritating young maniac who, years after he moved away, was hanged for assassinating President Garfield. ↗

— Sarah Vowell

#yay-history #food

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. ↗

— George Orwell

#mystical #truth #words #mysticism

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization. ↗

— Agnes Repplier

#cannot #civilization #much #palpable #people

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. ↗

— Albert Camus

#any #corner #face #feeling #man

[Mom] said she didn't want her youngest daughter dressed in the thrift-store clothes the rest of us wore. Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting. "Isn't that a sin?" I asked Mom. "Not exactly," Mom said. "God doesn't mind you bending the rules a little if you have good reason. It's sort of like justifiable homicide. This is justifiable pilfering. ↗

— Jeannette Walls

#family #glass-castle #jeannette-walls #family

In Britain, a cup of tea is the answer to every problem. Fallen off your bicycle? Nice cup of tea. Your house has been destroyed by a meteorite? Nice cup of tea and a biscuit. Your entire family has been eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex that has travelled through a space/time portal? Nice cup of tea and a piece of cake. Possibly a savoury option would be welcome here too, for example a Scotch egg or a sausage roll. ↗

— David Walliams

#britishness #cake #humour #tea #tyrannosaurus-rex

Every absurdity has a champion to defend it. ↗

— Oliver Goldsmith

#champion #defend #every