#sm

Nobody's happy. What's happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on." The older woman poured herself a glass of sangria. "Screw that," she said quietly. "What?" "Screw that. Wash your mouth out. Who taught you that half-assed existential drivel? ↗

— Armistead Maupin

#existentialism

This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving -- and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist. ↗

— Spider Robinson

#soider-robinson #existentialism

could you attempt, at least, to make yourself presentable? I know this is a war, but the rest of us are trying to pretend it's a party. ↗

— Kristin Cashore

#sarcasm #humor

Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women. It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#escape #eve #humor #paradise #sarcasm

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone? ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#authors #book #book-cover #books #criticism

I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life," Hughes wrote in a letter to the Independent in April, 1989, when he had been goaded by a particularly intrusive article. But, of course, as everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not "own" the facts of our lives at all. This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed. The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time are only an extension and a magnification of society's fundamental and incorrigible nosiness. Our business is everybody's business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe. In any struggle between the public's inviolable right to be diverted and an individual's wish to be left alone, the public almost always prevails. After we are dead, the pretense that we may somehow be protected against the world's careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently. The dead cannot be libelled or slandered. They are without legal recourse. ↗

— Janet Malcolm

#business

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#literary-criticism #literary-theory #narrative #nineteenth-century #novels

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#language #literary-criticism #literature #truth #literary-criticism

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it. Groucho Marx ↗

— Timar

#literary-criticism #literary-criticism

Analogies are like lies. ↗

— Roman Payne

#lies #literary-criticism #literary-criticism