#ali

When I read that the British army had landed thirty-two thousand troops - and I had realized, not very long before, that Philadelphia only had thirty thousand people in it - it practically lifted me out of my chair. ↗

— David McCullough

#before #british #chair #had #i

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable. ↗

— Robert Hughes

#industrialization #language #wwi #age

I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story. ↗

— John McGahern

#forever #going #i #i think #important

I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story. ↗

— John McGahern

#comes #consciousness #difference #excitement #great

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same. ↗

— Phyllis McGinley

#chatter #gossip #human #human race #lovers

If I was on the air and was just kind of a plain-vanilla personality that took the safe road and the safe way trying to please all of the people all of the time, I'd been gone in two weeks. ↗

— Phil McGraw

#been #gone #i #just #kind

You must now go home, where everything -- you can be quite sure -- will be falser than here....You must go now. You'll leave by the right, through the alley.... ↗

— Jean Genet

#home

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives. ↗

— Larry Wall

#change #determinism #fatalism #free-will #change

If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything. ↗

— Claude McKay

#cannot #faithful #his #individuality #loyal

Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation. (pg.99, "The Body and the Earth") ↗

— Wendell Berry

#creation #healing #health #life #loneliness