#sm

Lawyers are alright, I guess — but it doesn't appeal to me", I said. "I mean they're alright if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides, even if you did go around saving guys' lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys' lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren't being a phony? The trouble is you wouldn't. ↗

— J.D. Salinger

#holden-caulfield #phonies #the-catcher-in-the-rye #movies

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place. ↗

— Joan Didion

#criticism #film #movie #reviewers #movies

We all are characters in a movie. ↗

— Vivake Pathak

#determinism #fate #movies

A lifelong movie I already knew the ending to ↗

— Jason Najum

#essay #memoir #pop-culture #movies

...like the emperor striding confidently along without clothes, convinced by them and their inward monitions that their criticism is effecting changes in society. ↗

— Samuel Pickering

#change

He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#morality #murder #obedience #patriotism #war

C’est moi, c’est moi,’tis I,' I told him. It seemed appropriately melodramatic, though I didn’t know if he’d catch the reference. I shouldn’t have worried. Unexpectedly, he laughed. “Trust you to quote Lancelot rather than Guinevere. ↗

— Patricia Briggs

#mercy-thompson #musical-theater-reference #paranormal #sexism #shifter

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#bible #organized-religion #religion #religion

The pianokeys are black and white but they sound like a million colors in your mind ↗

— Maria Cristina Mena

#interpretation #music #philosophy #piano #racism

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.) ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#criticism #literature #reading #art