Even > Even's Quotes

“I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”

And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man: I am not even young. Just about the time they finally started inventing women, I started getting old. And I went right on doing it. Shamelessly. I have allowed myself to get old and haven’t done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“‎...minun mielestäni nykyinen teatteri vain pelkkää rutiinia, ennakkoluuloa. Kun esirippu nousee ja nuo suuret kyvyt, pyhän taiteen papit ja papittaret, esittävät kolmiseinäisessä huoneessa iltavalaistuksessa miten ihmiset syövät, juovat, rakastavat, kävelevät, miten kantavat pukuaan, kun he halpahintaisista kuvaelmista ja korulauseista koettavat onkia esiin moraalia — pientä, helppotajuista, kotioloissa tarvittavaa moraalia, kun minulle tuhansien eri muunnosten muodossa tarjotaan aina vain yhtä ja samaa, yhtä ja samaa, yhtä ja samaa — niin minä juoksen pakoon, juoksen pakoon kuin Maupassant Eiffel-tornia, joka pusersi hänen aivojaan lattaudellaan.”
― Anton Tšehov, Neljä Näytelmää

“We must accept our pain
Change what we can
and laugh at the rest”
― Camille Paglia

“Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? “I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.” The crowd cheers.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.”
― Emma Goldman

“Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.”
― Camille Paglia

“Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night.”
― Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.”
― Camille Paglia

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“Mitä teen oikeastaan sillä aitalla. Ei ole mitään niistä tarpeista, mitä varten se on tehty.
No.
Voin panna sinne tavaraa.
Voin katsoa sitä
Voin kontata alle.
Vois istua seinustalla kun aurinko paistaa.
On kaksi vaihtoehtoa, minulla on se aitta tai minulla ei ole sitä aittaa, kumpi on parempi. No. Se on aina parempi, joka tapahtuu, koska muuta vaihtoehtoa ei ole.”
― Antti Hyry

“Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.”
― Samuel Beckett

“…sense of futility that comes from doing anything merely to prove to yourself that you can do it: having a child, climbing a mountain, making some sexual conquest, committing suicide.
The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove it… to prove what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry the same message. They simply say: I’m so-and-so and I exist! They are free publicity for existence.
Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

“Grammar is politics by other means.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

“Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space