#cade

But once in a while . . . I don't know. I feel so close, Rose. So close to the edge. Like if I allow myself one small misstep, I'll plunge away and never come back. It's like I'll lose myself. ↗

— Richelle Mead

#adrian #hathaway #ivashkov #last #rose

If I didn't know any better, I'd say you just defended Christian's honor. Isn't he a pain in the ass? "Yes he is. But for the next 6 weeks he's MY pain in the ass. ↗

— Richelle Mead

#rose-hathaway #vampire-academy #christianity

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#exams #sobriety #career

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice. ↗

— Asti Hustvedt

#decadence #decadent #illusion #language #literature

Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in. ↗

— David Brooks

#graduate-school #intellectualism #meritocracy #self-actualization #upper-class

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#education #ideas #intellectualism #life #philosophy

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#education #school #education

How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself. ↗

— Criss Jami

#being-yourself #celebrities #emotional #facade #fame

A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite. ↗

— Robert Fanney

#genius #thought #genius

There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. ↗

— Woody Allen

#humor #science #humor