“I know where the past leads,” his mother would reply. “It’s a sad place. Why would I want to know it better? Does knowing make you happy?” “It ain’t about happy. It’s about being whole. You have a right to that. You have a duty to that.”
...more
“In 1904, Californian journalist Lincoln Steffens published an exposé entitled The Shame of the Cities. Steffens wrote that “politics is business. In America politics is an arm of business and the aim of business is to make money without care for the law, because politics, controlled by business, can change or buy the law. Politics is interested in profit, not municipal prosperity or civic pride. The spirit of graft and lawlessness is the American spirit.”
― The Annotated Big Sleep
― The Annotated Big Sleep
“Negation is the ability to take a distance from what-is, which increasingly becomes more difficult, given that the whole logic of our society is based on an ideology which insists that only what-is exists, or is possible, and that there is no place for anything outside of what already exists.”
― Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson's Seminar on Aesthetic Theory
― Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson's Seminar on Aesthetic Theory
“Well, little by little that’s gonna mean that you can’t imagine a future that’s different from this one, and finally that there is no real place for negativity, for imagination, fantasy, and so forth. Therefore, one of the great… [Cough in the audience] laments of the Frankfurt School — as the postwar went on into the 1960s, and so forth — is that this society of late capitalism is removing all the possible spaces from which any negation of it could be achieved.”
― Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson's Seminar on Aesthetic Theory
― Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson's Seminar on Aesthetic Theory
“However, just for the heck of it, he wiggled his bent Sidney’s out of his coat pocket, thumbed to ostrich comma male-female, old-young, sick-well, mint-used, and inspected the prices.”
― Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
― Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
“There is absolutely no way for a man of this age to acquire a decent affluence in life without to some degree corrupting himself, without accepting the cold, clear fact that success is always and everywhere a racket.”
― The Annotated Big Sleep
― The Annotated Big Sleep
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