#spectacle

Unfortunately they failed to appreciate the best part of you, preferring to lose themselves in the labyrinth of your grosser illusions. Didn't I show our well-behaved audience an angelized version of you? And you saw their reaction. They were bored and just sat in their seats like a bunch of stiffs. Of course, what can you expect? They wanted the death stuff, the pain stuff. All that flashy junk. They wanted cartwheels of agonized passion; somersaults into fires of doom; nosedives, if you will, into the frenzied pageant of vulnerable flesh. They wanted a tangible thrill. ("Drink To Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes") ↗

— Thomas Ligotti

#sadism #sensation #spectacle #thrills #death

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. ↗

— Guy Debord

#conditions #directly #everything #immense #into

I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored. ↗

— James Ellroy

#because #going #high #high school #i

My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences. ↗

— James Buchan

#belief #cannot #city #complex #consequences

The spectacle of a great, solvent government paying a fictitious price for gold it did not want and did not need and doing it on purpose to debase the value of its own paper currency was one to astonish the world. ↗

— Garet Garrett

#currency #debase #did #doing #fictitious

An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle. ↗

— Walter Bagehot

#also #ambassador #simply #spectacle