- "Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake."
- Napoleon (as quoted, I believe, in the first episode of Jonathon Strange & Mister Norrell)
If you get a chance to watch the BBC adaption, it appears well worth it, from the first episode.
Is it available on Netflix or anywhere where I can pay a reasonable amount of money for it? I can't believe i didn't know that this existed...
I'm glad its a series and not a film, they'll be able to give it the scope it deserves. I'm psyched!!!!!! My wife will be thrilled. We both loved the book.
- "Finnerty shook his head. "He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." He nodded. "Big, undreamed of things--the people on the edge see them first."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano.
- The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:
The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.
The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.
- Walker Percy
"When a narcissist turns the full burn of his energy on you, it's irresistible. You're bathed in this glow you could never imagine because his self-love is so big, and now you're in it." -- in a recent conversation with a divorce lawyer, said by one of her clients.
- "I drive myself to the edge of madness trying to explain the truth.
It's so simple. Elegant like a knife point. It explains - this is not hyperbole, this is the farthest thing from exaggeration - EVERYTHING.
But you lay it out and they stare at you like you've just been exhaling dust. Maybe they're missing some underlying scaffold of truth. Maybe they are all propped on a bed of lies that must be burned away.
Why does anything exist?
No no no no no don't reach for that word. There's no 'reason'. That's teleology and teleology will stitch your eyelids shut.
Why do we have atoms? Because atomic matter is more stable than the primordial broth. Atoms defeated the broth. That was the first war. There were two ways to be and one of them won. And everything that came next was made of atoms.
Atoms made stars. Stars made galaxies. Worlds simmered down to rock and acid and in those smoking primal seas the first living molecule learned to copy itself. All of this happened by the one law, the blind law, which exists without mind or meaning. It's the simplest law but it has no worshippers here (out there, though, out there - !)
HOW DO I EXPLAIN IT it's so simple WHY DON'T YOU SEE
Imagine three great nations under three great queens. The first queen writes a great book of law and her rule is just. The second queen builds a high tower and her people climb it to see the stars. The third queen raises an army and conquers everything.
The future belongs to one of these queens. Her rule is harshest and her people are unhappy. But she rules.
This explains everything, understand? This is why the universe is the way it is, and not some other way. Existence is a game that everything plays, and some strategies are winners: the ability to exist, to shape existence, to remake it so that your descendants - molecules or stars or people or ideas - will flourish, and others will find no ground to grow.
And as the universe ticks on towards the close, the great players will face each other. In the next round there will be three queens and all of them will have armies, and now it will be a battle of swords - until one discovers the cannon, or the plague, or the killing word.
Everything is becoming more ruthless and in the end only the most ruthless will remain (LOOK UP AT THE SKY) and they will hunt the territories of the night and extinguish the first glint of competition before it can even understand what it faces or why it has transgressed. This is the shape of victory: to rule the universe so absolutely that nothing will ever exist except by your consent. This is the queen at the end of time, whose sovereignty is eternal because no other sovereign can defeat it. And there is no reason for it, no more than there was reason for the victory of the atom. It is simply the winning play.
Of course, it might be that there was another country, with other queens, and in this country they sat down together and made one law and one tower and one army to guard their borders. This is the dream of small minds: a gentle place ringed in spears.
-Toland, The Shattered.
This is a quote from the story element of Destiny. The online collection of text-blurbs and dialogue extracts that gives any modicum of depth to the universe.
- One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won’t. That’s not just okay, that’s the point. It’s ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die. And it will have been worth it.
-The Last Psychiatrist
Recent discussions around here have reminded me of this this morning; sincerely thankful for all of you unreasonable people :
- The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
― George Bernard Shaw
- When once they stalked the deer, or crouched shivering in the mud for the
flight of ducks to alight, or risked their lives on the crags after goats,
or closed in with shouts upon a wild boar at bay--that was not work, though
often the breath came hard and the limbs were heavy. When the women bore
and nursed children, or wandered in the woods for berries and mushrooms, or
tended the fire at the entrance to the rock-shelter--that was not work
either.
So also, when they sang and danced and made love, that was not play. By the singing and dancing the spirits of forest and water might be placated -- a serious matter, though still one might enjoy the song and the dance. And as for the making of love, by that-and by the favor of the gods--the tribe was maintained.
So in the first years work and play mingled always, and there were not even the words for one against the other.
But centuries flowed by and then more of them, and many things changed. Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking. Sleep came to be thought a kind of relaxation, and "sleeping on the job" a heinous sin. The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm-clock were not so much the symbols of man's dual life as were the punching of the time-clock and the blowing of the whistle. Men marched on picket-lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile.
- George R. Stewart, "Earth Abides"
- "They were the sort that went trampling all over your pet stamp collection, or whatever it was, and then spent the rest of their lives atoning for it. But you would rather have had your stamp collection."
- Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm
- Photojournalism, it’s a way of noting, well some journalists are wonderful writers and others are just putting facts one after the other and facts are not interesting. Facts are not interesting. It’s a point of view on facts which is important and in photography it is re-evocation if you evoke and this consists evoking.