Alberta Secor

“Photojournalism has frequently been lambasted for being the product of circumstance. In fact rarely are any of these images considered in terms of their composition and semantic intent. They are merely news, a happy intersection of event and opportunity. It hardly helps that photographs in general also take only a fraction of a second to acquire.

It is incredible how so many people can constantly misread speed to mean ease. This is certainly most common where photography is concerned. However simply because anyone can buy a camera, shutter away, and then with a slightly prejudiced eye justify the product does not validate the achievement. Shooting a target with a rifle is accomplished with similar speed and yet because the results are so objective no one suggests that marksmanship is easy.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“The belief that we somehow moved on to something else - whether still recognisably ourselves, or quite thoroughly changed - might be a tribute to our evolutionary tenacity and our animal thirst for life, but not to our wisdom. That saw a value beyond itself; in intelligence, knowledge and wit as concepts - wherever and by whoever expressed - not just in its own personal manifestation of those qualities, and so could contemplate its own annihilation with equanimity, and suffer it with grace; it was only a sort of sad selfishness that demanded the continuation of the individual spirit in the vanity and frivolity of a heaven.”
― Iain Banks

“I mean, nobody tells you sex is going to be so _noisy_, do they? ...”
― Iain Banks, The Crow Road

“Atheists loved to use that term to describe some shadowy force that somehow controlled human destiny, but what the hell did they think the universe was? Did they think the stars and nebulae took an interest in their doings, and if they really meant God, why couldn’t they just say so?”
― Poppy Z. Brite, Prime