Chase Stewart

“Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal; but Gold and Silver will pass all the world over without any other recommendation than their own weight.”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“I think it's the future. At least, it's the future
we called "tomorrow." Here it is,
"today": one hundred cups of effort,
good intentions, small misunderstandings,
stretching away from the bed
and finally leading back to it.”
― Albert Goldbarth, The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007

“Love is a source of anxiety until it is source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit. Love raises great expectations in us that it never satisfies; the hopes based on friendship are milder and in the present, and they exist only because they've already been rewarded. Love is a script about just a few repeated themes we have a hard time following, though we make every effort to conform to its tone. Friendship is a permis de séjour that enables us to go anywhere and do anything exactly as our whims dictate.”
― Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s

“The truth is that we're drowning in busywork, nonproductive work, everything from "creative" banking and insurance bureaucracies to the pointless shuffling of data and the manufacturing of products designed to be obsolescent almost immediately- and I would argue that a great deal of what we're doing should just stop. Interestingly, people of all sorts are beginning to reconnect to skills and sensibilities that were bulldozed in the frenzy of 'development' that remade our world during the past two generations. Those orchards and fields that once covered the peninsula, the East Bay, and Silicon Valley are haunting us now, as we seek to relocalize our food sources and our economy more generally. People are relearning how to reuse things, how to fix broken items, and even how to make new things from the scraps of industrial waste. The world shaped by capitalist modernization is not good for human life and is certainly rough on the health of the planet. The hollowing out of communities whose lives were once anchored in the old Produce Market area or who shared life along the vibrant Fillmore blues corridor is precisely what people are trying to overcome.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas