Poshlost > Poshlost's Quotes

“Of course we did everything right, insofar as we were able to imagine what "right" was.”
― Donald Barthelme, Sadness

“The human libido is essentially narcissistic, but it seeks a world to love as it loves itself.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Why was she dancing? No reason. Just alive, I guess.”
― George Saunders, Tenth of December

“The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing.”
― Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials - The Trilogy: The Golden Compass / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass

“Is it surprising that the people could see their fate and that of the world only as an endless succession of evils? Bad governance, exactions, the cupidity and violence of the great, wars and brigandage, scarcity, misery and pestilence—to this is contemporary history nearly reduced in the eyes of the people. The feeling of general insecurity which was caused by the chronic form wars were apt to take, by the constant menace of the dangerous classes, by the mistrust of justice, was further aggravated by the obsession of the coming end of the world, and by the fear of hell, of sorcerers and of devils. The background of all life in the world seems black. Satan covers a gloomy earth with his somber wings.”
― Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages

“I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“I did not yet love, and I loved to love; I sought what I might love, in love with loving.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“It is August.
My life is going to change. I feel it.”
― Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“303. "I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I am."—Yes: one can make the decision to say "I believe he is in pain" instead of "He is in pain". But that is all.——What looks like an explanation here, or like a statement about a mental process, is in truth an exchange of one expression for another which, while we are doing philosophy, seems the more appropriate one.
Just try—in a real case—to doubt someone else's fear or pain.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“Mediocrity is contextual.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It’s not love that the past needs in order to survive, it’s an absence of choices.”
― Susan Sontag

“The snow is coming," she said. "Soon it will be snow time. Together then as in other snow times. Drinking busthead 'round the fire. Truth is a locked room that we knock the lock off from time to time, and then board up again. Tomorrow you will hurt me, and I will inform you that you have done so, and so on and so on. To hell with it. Come, viridian friend, come and sup with me.”
― Donald Barthelme, Amateurs

“So far, therefore, as the science of exchange relates to the advantage of one of the exchanging persons only, it is founded on the ignorance or incapacity of the opposite person. . . . It is therefore a science founded on nescience. . . . This science, alone of sciences, must, by all available means, promulgate and prolong its opposite nescience. . . . It is therefore peculiarly and alone science of darkness.”
― John Ruskin, Unto This Last

“All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

“Others live for the lie of love; Echo lives for her lovely lies, loves for their livening.”
― John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

“Jokes and folklore and poetic metaphor, the wisdom of folly, tell the secret truth.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“Mindy Sue, you are a pretty, lively, successful female, fluent in French and German. You are a professional woman but also sportif. You care buckets, I can see that. How did you get yourself in this terrible predicament? How did you become a four-line seventy-five-cents-a-word advertisement in the back pages of The New York Review of Books?”
― Donald Barthelme

“The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Philosophy is really homesickness: the urge to be at home everywhere.”
― Novalis

“Later that night I wake up screaming. A rat is at me, biting and biting me, and I cannot move.”
― Beverly Lowry

“We act by virtue of what we recognize as beneficial. At the present time, negation is the most beneficial of all—and we deny.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“I crack the other egg.
Surely we have diminished one another.”
― Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems

“Homer’s Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!”
― Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“Anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.”
― Donald Barthelme

“For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal.”
― Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

“The nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic

“The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.”
― W. B. Yeats