#lace

It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#art

Every place in the country you should get a license that shows you know how to safely store it, keep it away from your children or grandchildren. You should have to license it so the police can trace it if it's used in a crime. ↗

— Michael D. Barnes

#children #country #crime #every #get

I once tried standing up on my toes to see far out in the distance, but I found that I could see much farther by climbing to a high place. ↗

— Xun Zi

#could #distance #far #farther #found

It may not seem this way at first, but your workplace is actually built on a well-ordered system of individuals and groups with defined stations of importance, all interacting to make your company run and appear busy. ↗

— Martin Fossum

#business

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world ↗

— Ron Rash

#people #places #tragedy #violence #death

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time. ↗

— Emma Goldman

#binds #chariot #conditions #ever #fixed

The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. ↗

— George Eliot

#security #change

In truth I suspect that merely slowing down is not a very satisfying answer. What I need has less to do with my pace of life than my peace of life. At any speed, I crave a deep and lasting inner peace. And if it's solace I'm after, I don't need to pace myself like a turtle, change jobs or set up house on a quiet island. It is usually frenetic living, not high energy, that robs my peace of mind. ↗

— Steve Goodier

#inner-peace #pace #peace #peace-of-mind #peacefulness

Aware that his disappointment has its source in a defective education, he looks with anxiety on his other daughters, whose minds, like lovely buds, are beginning to open. Where shall he find a genial soil in which he may place them to expand? ↗

— Emma Willard

#aware #beginning #buds #daughters #defective

I talked about 12 to 18 months, and that's about reaffirming our foundation for sustained growth: getting the discipline back, getting the basics right, getting the customer focus back... so by the end of next year, I hope most of that's in place. ↗

— Jim Cantalupo

#back #basics #customer #discipline #end