#bart

I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love. ↗

— Donald Barthelme

#humor #me-and-miss-mandible #short-story #wives #beauty

I rode my horse to the saloon, but it was out of business. The cowboy I spoke with said the bartender served the saloon’s last drink on March 5th, 1882. Guess I shouldn’t have taken so long to shower and get ready. Ah, but that’s life, no?
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#bartender #cowboy #life #saloon #shower

According to some, heroic deaths are admirable things. I've never been convinced by this argument, mainly because, no matter how cool, stylish, composed, unflappable, manly, or defiant you are, at the end of the day you're also dead. Which is a little too permanent for my liking. ↗

— Jonathan Stroud

#bartimaeus-trilogy #jonathan-stroud #death

There's nothing to took forward to any more if you don't have dreams," he said. "Because dreams are goals and John might have run out of goals. So he died. ↗

— Melina Marchetta

#dreams #goals #jacob #john-barton #josephine

Hippo in a skirt: this was a comic reference to one of Solomon's principal wives, the one from Moab. Childish? Yes. But in the days before printing we had limited opportunities for satire. ↗

— Jonathan Stroud

#humor #humor

Assimilate ubiquitously. Doublethink. To deliberately believe in lies, while knowing they're false. Examples of this in everyday life: "oh, I need to be pretty to be happy. I need surgery to be pretty. I need to be thin, famous, fashionable.". Our young men today are being told that women are **, **, things to be **, beaten, **, and shamed. This is a marketing holocaust. Twenty-fours hours a day for the rest of our lives, the powers that be are hard at work dumbing us to death. So to defend ourselves, and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read. To stimulate our own imagination, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need skills to defend, to preserve, our own minds. ↗

— Henry Barthes

#detachment #henry-barthes #death

The happy life does not mean loving what we possess, but possessing what we love." Possession of the beloved, St. Thomas holds, takes place in an act of cognition, in seeing, in intuition, in contemplation. ↗

— Josef Pieper

#bartolome-de-medina #contemplation #happiness #st-thomas #life

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape," Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, "on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life? ↗

— Edith Wharton

#life

Doubt thou the stars are fire Doubt that the sun doth move Doubt truth to be a liar But never doubt that I love...I love thee best, O most best, believe it. ↗

— Amy Bartol and William Shakespeare

#love

Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling had one all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! All Roads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more than another, so that with one Life to spend I am a Man bare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair of Breeches, or a Scholar at Brookstalls with Money for a single Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one, impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions are wondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. I cannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech falleth to the Ground! ↗

— John Barth

#john-barth #vocation #money