Will Shoemaker > Will's Quotes

“Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“Explosion without an objective', declared Miles Blundell, 'is politics in its purest form'.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“I am large, I contain multitudes”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I

“They think they know the book by its cover, but the book knows what it is. Now he knew better; if the book never opens up and comes out, it can be warped to fit the image others see.

. . .No, a book wasn't invulnerable to the appearance of its cover, not by any means.”
― Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

“Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“I took a little celebrational nap.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”
― Maggie Nelson

“20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“Keep cool but care”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“You are your best thing”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists.”
― Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

“A paradox is simply an error out of control; i.e. one that has trapped so many unwary minds that it has gone public, become institutionalized in our literature, and taught as truth.”
― E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science

“any analysis of the gospel which did not begin and end with God's liberation of the oppressed was ipso facto unchristian.”
― James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed

“What people think about God, Jesus Christ, and the Church cannot be separated from their own social and political status in a given society.”
― James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed

“I do think that it is impossible to do Christian theology with integrity in America without asking the question, What has the gospel to do with the black struggle for liberation?”
― James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed

“Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone.”
― Mark Fisher

“Bring forward what is true. Write it so that it is clear. Defend it to your last breath.”
― Ludwig Boltzmann

“War is just demographics in a hurry.”
― Gary Brecher, War Nerd

“It's always the same story: It's not 'violence' until somebody hits you back. Till then, you don't notice your guys hitting the other tribe. That's just normal background noise. It takes blood, buckets of it, to get a person's attention. And not just anybody's blood--it's gotta be your own, or that of a close relative. Otherwise it's just spots on the sidewalk.”
― Gary Brecher, War Nerd