Amber > Recent Status Updates

100 pages to go. Need to finish this before the AF tomorrow — or, rather, later today, because it’s 01h14.

“There is no stupidity that fails to interest me.”

“The mind is the perpetual motion machine. You’re not ever free of anything. Your mind’s in the hands of everything.”

“I love how you expose your mind when you talk.”

“Botanically beguiling, delicately done… but you ain’t foolin’ anyone.”

“He'd paid the full price for art, only he hadn't made any. He'd suffered all the old-fashioned artistic sufferings—isolation, poverty, despair, mental and physical obstruction-and nobody knew or cared.
And though nobody knowing or caring was another form of artistic suffering, in his case it had no artistic meaning. He was just someone who had grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions.”

“Sabbath was a realist, ferociously a realist, so that by sixty-four he had all but given up on making contact with the living, let alone discussing his problems with the dead.”

“The problem, she's starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a dinerlike purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders.”

Departure:
“Retrospect shall not soften such penury —
Sun’s brass, the moon’s steely patinas,
The leaden slag of the world—
But always expose.”

The Everlasting Monday:
“Until his own lit room outshone
Sunday’s ghost of Sun;
Now works his hell of Mondays in the moon’s ball,
Fireless, seven chill seas chained to his ankle.”

It took me an hour to get through 26 pages because I’m trying to read this as carefully as possible. I’ll see you guys when I’m 37.

“and then Socrates will do as he always does — refuse to answer himself, but take and pull to pieces the answer of someone else.” I behave so much like Socrates but not maliciously or pretentiously. I also go around asking questions and not providing an answer because I do not know. If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking. But I’m not lying, is the difference.

“And so, you and Homer and Simonides are agreed that justice is an art of theft; to be practised however “for the good of friends and for the harm of enemies,” — that was what you were saying?” I think I agree with this, that justice is an art of theft. When justice is served, the punished have essentially been stripped of the freedom of choice — they’re jailed, forced to pay or return a debt, etc.