"There was a time when people felt as if structure in most forms were a constraint and they attacked it, which in a culture is like an autoimmune problem: the organism is not allowing itself the conditions of its own existence."
Marilynne Robinson
(Source: theparisreview.org)
"In the development of every character there’s a kind of emotional entanglement that occurs. The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking. The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately."
Marilynne Robinson
(Source: theparisreview.org)
"[T]he eye loses its supposed innocence the moment the child begins its apprenticeship to language. Before words came along the child did not even see fat stains of colour, let alone “merely as such.” The things we see do not somehow classify themselves by their own visible criteria, independently of all else."
Roy Harris, The Great Debate About Art
"I hate tennis, hate it with all my heart, and still I keep playing, keep hitting all morning, and all afternoon, because I have no choice. No matter how much I want to stop, I don’t. I keep begging myself to stop, and I keep playing, and this gap, this contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do, feels like the core of my life."
Andre Agassi
(Source: mtthwsvc, via gilesruffer)
"Yo me proponía cosas tales como: ¿porqué salir como un estúpido a decir que estoy en contra de la burguesía? ¿Porqué no llevar a los límites y volver manifiesto lo que sería el discurso de la burguesía? ¿Qué va a quedar comprometido?"
Osvaldo Lamborghini, in response to “Qué te proponías con ‘El Niño Proletario’”
"I have / no master but often wonder, / what is making my master sad?"
Matthew Zapruder, from “Erstwhile Harbinger Auspices”
"Well, we live out in the country now, so we don’t have “real” TV or cable. So what we watch is on DVD But I pretty much (when on the road, say) just whatever happens to come on. Like the other day I watched that show re Nicki Minaj’s tour. Whatever. It’s all input. And every- and anything can tell you something essential about the species. Even if it’s only by observing the falseness of the frame, if you will - the internalized distortions the particular program has taken on etc etc."
George Saunders
(Source: theparisreview.org)
"[T]here’s a big gulf between all of those thousands of in-the-moment typing bursts and what I would consider “the literary” - and that is revision."
George Saunders
(Source: theparisreview.org)
"The eye for possible advantages is the mortal enemy of all human relationships; from these solidarity and loyalty can ensue, but never from thoughts of practical ends."
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
"In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so."
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
