1983 Quotes

“It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.”
― Raymond Carver

“You will die, and I, and all we can create—why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge.”
― John Brunner, The Crucible of Time

“To my generation has now come the challenge. In the days to come we will be tested on whether we have the moral courage, the realism, the idealism, the tenacity, and the ability to sacrifice some of the current comfort to invest in the future... I believe that this generation will rise to the challenge... The experts believe that, like the Democratic Party itself, the less than forty-year-old voters are prepared to sell their souls for some security, real or illusory. They have misjudged us. Just because our political heroes were murdered does not mean that the dream does not still live, buried deep in our broken hearts.”
― Joe Biden, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics

“Hooray, I wake from yesterday,
Alive but the war is here to stay,
So my love Katherina and me
Decide to take our last walk through the noise to the sea,
Not to die but to be reborn,
Away from a land so battered and torn…
Forever…”
― Jimi Hendrix

“Lefever describes his financing plan with modesty:

"'Our detailed budget is realistic, but does not take into account the inflation that may occur before September 1983. The one place it could cut or reduce is item 7, the simultaneous interpreter services, if these services could be provided gratis by the U.S. government.'"

"In other words, the only way to make a saving on a U.S.-subsidized project is to take money out of another U.S.-subsidized column.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“It was not unless one lifted one's gaze from all the allegedly normal events occurring before one's eyes and looked at the executioner's sword hanging over everyone's head that the normality was revealed as a sort of mass insanity. . . Passengers on a ship who are . . . engaging in all the usual shipboard activities appear perfectly normal as long as their ship is sailing safely in quiet seas, but . . . deranged if in full view of them all their ship is caught in a vortex that may shortly drag it and them to destruction.”
― Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth

“L’« objectivisme » anti-émotionnel et facticement impassible trahit sa fausseté par la contradiction suivante : ceux qui se font les porte-parole d'une rationalité imperturbable et impertinente sont en même temps ceux qui préconisent l'amour libre — ils n’ont aucun goût à l'ascétisme — ou qui s’enflamment dès qu'on parle de politique, et autres inconséquences de ce genre ; ce qui prouve que leur « objectivité » n'est qu'erreur et ostentation, qu'elle est apparentée à l'orgueil et à l'amertume ; d'où la propension à blanchir les hommes vils — sauf quand par hasard ce sont des adversaires politiques — et à noircir les hommes de bien, calmement et sans passion, du moins sans passion visible ; c'est là un exemple de cette morale à sens unique, si caractéristique pour tous les genres d’hypocrisie. Quoi qu'il en soit, il faut réagir contre l'opinion psychanalytique — très répandue — que l’indignation aussi bien que l’enthousiasme révèlent toujours un préjugé ou un parti pris ; opinion simpliste qui est voisine d’une autre erreur non moins sotte, à savoir que dans une discorde nul n’a jamais tout à fait raison, et que celui qui s’emporte à toujours tort.”
― Frithjof Schuon, Résumé de métaphysique intégrale

“l'embaumeur lui avait collé la bouche avec du ciment
et la dernière image qu'il laissa de lui
fut très loin de celle qu'on lui avait connue
« il se ressemble davantage
sur ses portraits », disait-on
et dans sa barque funéraire
on ne mit en vérité que peu de choses
sinon le drame d'une vie qu'il ne trouva pas la force d'achever”
― Gérald Godin

“A big reason for their hesitancy to become recording artists was that during their time at WBAU the Spectrum camp has been observing the harsh realities of the developing rap game. Inflated egos meant that they had to treat the upcoming acts who played at their gigs like kings. But after the shows the Spectrum crew would then drive those acts back to the same impoverished neighbourhoods that they'd always lived in. Driving supposed rap stars back to the projects made an impression. 'None of them were really getting paid off records so I was like, "Damn",' is how Chuck assessed the situation.”
― Russell Myrie, Don't Rhyme for the Sake of Riddlin'

“Guitars (except when played in "classical"—that is, archaic—style) are low [status] by nature, and that is why they were so often employed as tools of intentional class degradation by young people in the 1960s and '70s. The guitar was the perfect instrument for the purpose of signaling these young people's flight from the upper-middle and middle classes, associated as it is with Gypsies, cowhands, and other personnel without inherited or often even earned money and without fixed residence.”
― Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System