Steve Kemple

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
― Albert Camus

“The door smiled. It was the first time I'd seen it do that. Pierre Anthon left the door ajar like a grinning abyss that would swallow me up into the outside with him if only I let myself go. Smiling at whom? At me, at us. I looked around the class. The uncomfortable silence told me the others had felt it too.

We were supposed to amount to something.”
― Janne Teller, Nothing

“we have measured the value of the world with categories that refer to a purely fabricated world.” A fabricated world? Yes, the world as a superstructure, the world as a spirit, weightless and abstract, of the same material with which thoughts are woven, and through which therefore they can move unhindered. A world that after three hundred years of natural science is left without mysteries. Everything is explained, everything is understood, everything lies within humanity’s horizons of comprehension, from the biggest, the universe, whose oldest observable light, the farthest boundary of the cosmos, dates from its birth fifteen billion years ago, to the smallest, the protons and neutrons and mesons of the atom.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“Definition, like poetry, is the project of revivifying the familiar. Making things we think we know seem newly strange. To estrange, according to Hegel, is requisite to practicing consciousness.”
― Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange