#semen

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#children #entertainment #readers #reading #solitude

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few. ↗

— John Masefield

#become #being #came #ceased #community

An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#loneliness #sincerity #art

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents. ↗

— George Orwell

#advertisement #christian #christian religion #religion #socialism

This is real human drama, we're not creating some amusement park ride for the summer. Even though the movie is really exciting to watch, it's got a real pathos behind it. ↗

— John C. Reilly

#behind #creating #drama #even #exciting

But, look, Washington is a town that creates myths for its own existence and its own amusement, and I was a subject of myth, sort of like Grendel in Beowulf - you know, not seen very often but often talked about. ↗

— Karl Rove

#amusement #creates #existence #i #know

A journalistic purpose could be someone with a Xerox machine in a basement. ↗

— Antonin Scalia

#could #journalistic #machine #purpose #someone

...It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it. ↗

— Edith Wharton

#amusement #age

After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations. ↗

— David Sedaris

#apartment #art #basement #both #civilizations

I am drawn to Tom Sawyer Island because a tribute to Mark Twain would not be out of place in a theme park of my own design. Should Vowell World ever get enough investors, I'm going to stick my Tom Sawyer Island in Love and Death in the American Novel Land right between the Jay Gatsby Swimming Pool and Tom Joad's Dust Bowl Lanes, a Depression-themed bowling alley renting artfully worn-out shoes. ↗

— Sarah Vowell

#as-i-lay-dying #great-gatsby #humor #mark-twain #tom-sawyer