Jonathan Cook > Jonathan's Quotes

“A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition.”
― V. Vale, Re/Search #12: Modern Primitives

“When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on them arrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.”
― Chris Bohjalian, Secrets of Eden

“The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.”
― Marge Kennedy

“For us the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generally it is a simple circle, dyutamandalam, drawn on the ground. The circle as such, however, has a magic significance. It is drawn with great care, all sorts of precautions being taken against cheating. The players are not allowed to leave the ring until they have discharged their obligations. But, sometimes a special hall is provisionally erected for the game, and this hall is holy ground. The Mahabharata devotes a whole chapter to the erection of the dicing hall - sabha - where the Pandavas are to meet their prtners. Games, of chance, therefore, have their serious side. They are included in ritual.”
― Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture

“Our point of departure must be the conception of an almost childlike play-sense expressing itself in various play-forms, some serious, some playful, but all rooted in ritual and productive of culture by allowing the innate human need of rhythm, harmony, change, alternation, contrast and climax, etc., to unfold in full richness.”
― Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture

“Virtual worlds are places of imagination that encompass practices of play, performance, creativity and ritual.”
― Tom Boellstorff, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method

“Just as in the physical world, people within virtual worlds perform and cycle through different roles and identities. Virtual worlds make such shifts explicit, as well as introducing spaces for play and performance.”
― Tom Boellstorff, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method

“Huge volumes of data may be compelling at first glance, but without an interpretive structure they are meaningless.”
― Tom Boellstorff, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method

“Ritual may be vital to reaction, but it is also the life blood of revolution.”
― David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power

“What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1

“Those who think of their house as only a ‘machine to live in’ should judge their point of view by that Neolithic man, who also lived in a house, but a house that embodied a cosmology.”
― Ananda Coomaraswamy

“Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.”
― Henry Miller

“One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking things.”
― Henry Miller

“The physical as a symbol of the spiritual world. The people who keep old rags, old useless objects, who hoard, accumulate: are they also keepers and hoarders of old ideas, useless information, lovers of the past only, even in its form of detritus?…I have the opposite obsession. In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use. I keep nothing to remind me of the passage of time, deterioration, loss, shriveling.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

“The sauce to meat is ceremony; Meeting were bare without it.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“A cup of tea would restore my normality."

[Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Screenplay]”
― Douglas Adams

“Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.”
― Arthur Schlesinger

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
― Bob Samples

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Annajanska the Bolshevik Empress

“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”
― Novalis

“The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan