brian annan
https://www.goodreads.com/bignothing00
Oscar Grant is you—and you are him—because you know in the pit of your stomach that it could’ve been you, and the same thing could’ve happened. You know this. And what’s worse is this: you pay for this every time you pay taxes, and you
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“This book has been written against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith.”
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Destruction and humiliation didn’t matter. Only memory and integrity did. Was the hour I was living through right now different from the hour they were living through then? Did it matter? From what hour does one recite the evening Sh’ma?”
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
“We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known. If we call death a sleep, it’s because it seems like sleep on the outside; if we call death a new life, it’s because it seems like something different from life. With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make believe they’re happy.”
― The Book of Disquiet
― The Book of Disquiet
“Religion robs the soul of its independence; patriotism is the stupid worship of the world for which the well-being and the peace of the inhabitants were sacrificed by those who profit by it, while the laws of the land, in restraining natural desires, were waging war on the manifest spirit of the law of our beings. Compared with this," he concluded, "thieving is an honorable pursuit."10”
― Anarchism and Other Essays
― Anarchism and Other Essays
“everything I live, all of it equally condemned to change*… Landscapes are repetitions. On a simple train ride I uselessly and restlessly waver between my inattention to the landscape and my inattention to the book that would amuse me if I were someone else. Life makes me feel a vague nausea, and any kind of movement aggravates it. Only landscapes that don’t exist and books I’ll never read aren’t tedious. Life, for me, is a drowsiness that never reaches the brain. This I keep free, so that I can be sad there.”
― The Book of Disquiet
― The Book of Disquiet
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