#roc

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#photography #war-photography #photography

I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot of contamination must be an exquisite treasure-an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not? ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#conscience

The great thing about rock-n-roll is you realize the top of the mountain is big enough for more than one band. ↗

— Paul Stanley

#band #big #big enough #enough #great

Birds are the last of the dinosaurs. Tiny velociraptors with wings. Devouring defenseless wiggly things and, and nuts, and fish, and, and other birds. They get the early worms. And have you ever watched a chicken eat? They may look innocent, but birds are, well, they're vicious. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#innocence

This is England," he explained. "Tell someone it's a procedure, and they'll believe you. The pointless procedure is one of our great natural resources. ↗

— Maureen Johnson

#law #london #procedures #nature

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had." [Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#creativity #originality #point-of-view #uniqueness #writing

In the holy solipsism of the young Now I can't walk thru a city street w/out eying each single pedestrian. I feel thier vibe thru my skin, the hair on my neck --- it rises. ↗

— Jim Morrison

#me #rockandroll #yoga #yoga

It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance. ↗

— Steven Pressfield

#write #writing #writing-life #writing-process #art

The Procrustean bed. . .suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There's just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it. ↗

— Anne Fadiman

#culture-wars #political-correctness #procrustes #censorship

On the issue of censorship of pornography and rock music, do you see that as a religious issue, too? Yes, I do. Incidentally, I don't like rock music. I never have liked it. I have never understood it, and I can't hear the lyrics. I think that most people can't hear them either. I'm still stuck with Chopin and Beethoven and Bach, and all those old ones. The whole point is, I feel that everyone who wants to say anything, do anything, should be able to say anything or do anything, within the limits of not hurting another person. And I don't see how rock music hurts anybody, or I don't see that pornography hurts anybody. ↗

— Madalyn Murray O'Hair

#music