Erik

“I confess I get a pain from reading valuable works by certain sociologists, political experts, economists, and historians who write in code. Hermetic language isn't the invariable and inevitable price of profundity. In some cases it can simply conceal incapacity for communication raised to the category of intellectual virtue. I suspect that boredom can thus often serve to sanctify the established order, confirming that knowledge is a privilege of the elite.”
― Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

“Dear Critics, since you employ the term "absurd humor," you should introduce its counterpart, "absurd seriousness." Learn to distinguish between forced and primitive seriousness, lighthearted and gallows seriousness. This bracingly sensical conception will jump-start critics and journalists alike. Do we not require, in life as in art, indiscriminate seriousness? bawdy seriousness? sparkling seriousness? spirited seriousness? I would read with pleasure about thinker X's "terrific sense of seriousness," about bard Ys "pearls of seriousness," about avant-garde Z's "offensive seriousness." Some reviewer or other will finally decide to remark that "playwright N. N.'s feeble play is redeemed by the effervescent seriousness of its conclusion" or that "in W.S's poetry one catches notes of unintentional seriousness." And why don't humor magazines have columns of seriousness? And why, moreover, do we have so many humor magazines and so few serious ones? Well?”
― Wisława Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading

“So Ryan was red as a beetroot. And Clara was black as yer boot”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“In a fit of nostalgia, and because he was the only man Samad knew on this little island, Samad had sought Archie out, moved into the same London borough. And slowly but surely a kind of friendship was being rekindled between the two men.

'You play like a faggot,' said Samad”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth