“Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret
et mala perrumpet furtim fastidia victrix.
(Drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she'll come right back,
Victorious over your ignorant confident scorn.)”
― The Epistles of Horace
et mala perrumpet furtim fastidia victrix.
(Drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she'll come right back,
Victorious over your ignorant confident scorn.)”
― The Epistles of Horace
“Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.”
― The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
― The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.”
― Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
― Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
“His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar.”
― Against Nature
― Against Nature
“In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...”
― Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
― Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
John’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at John’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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