Ben > Recent Status Updates

“He was saying what Lasher had said the night before, talking about the spiritual disaster across the river, about the threat of revolution, about the hierarchy that was a nightmare to most. The way he phrased it, it wasn't a condemnation, it was a plea for refutation.”

“the key that unlocks it all. I’ll never understand the mechanism, but who cares, so long as the story opens, right?”

“Tall Dog could have taken the bundle, but without the songs, no one could ever open it. When the strings around it let go…the bundle would open…spill what was inside onto the ground for the rain to wash into the river. Since all the waters are one water…then Kills-for-Nothing could find her face…walk onto shore…and be his wife.
This was how most of Tall Dog's stories ended, with him getting a wife.”

“Seasonal abandonment was a practice fuelled by the old and unfounded prejudice that cats, unlike dogs, built attachment to places rather than people. A cat belonged to the farm, not the farmer, to the alley not the urchin, the ship not the sailor. It liked being left to its own devices.”

“
-there is no more time! For God’s sake, Alex — is dying the only thing we’ll ever do together?
“

“Drowning unwanted litters was standard practice…it must have been a heartless fancier who did not occasionally pause to reflect on the obscenity of lavishing care…on one kitten while consigning multiple others to a cold, wet death…Supply and demand, birth and slaughter, were caught up in a Malthusian nightmare in which the underclass was always expanding no matter how quickly you tried to kill it off.”

“But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”

“Our hands and feet might go black and dead from the cold and our eyes might go blind in the snow, but we would never starve, not in the valleys Napi had shaped for us.
You could never starve in one of your towns like this, could you? It's the same for us.”

“I cited the tears, never the spit.
You need to be polite in your suffering, should you be granted the right to a roof over your head.”

“Take a good look around us []…at the shadows. At the darkness…around me. You said [to take you] somewhere that’s not here. This is that somewhere. This place is a drift…where the dead cling to the living…drowning in jealousy and yearning. A garbage heap of losers […] what you see is what you get. […] There’s no paradise..for you to escape to. What you’ll find…[] is just… a battlefield.”

“Was all of this excellent art made by, and for, the bourgeoisie enabling and cloaking czarist excesses all along, and was this part of the reason the Stalinists turned so violently against humanist virtues?
These questions are above my pay grade. (Even asking them has made me a little anxious.)”

“(If a character, talking along in a certain voice, has never seen a horse before, and I show him one, his voice has to expand, to accommodate the horse.)”

“Finally, he succeeds in dropping it, but a policeman immediately sees him and orders him to pick it up. (So, Ivan's paranoia is justified: this world really is that watchful.)”

“(We might say that a first-time reader is able to intuit the many less-cared-for versions of a sentence behind the one the writer let stand.)”

“According to Donald Barthelme, ‘The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.’”

“Argos, the dog that lay there, raised his head and ears…he lay neglected, without an owner, in a pile of dung from mules and cows—the slaves stored heaps of it outside the door, until they fertilized the large estate. So Argos lay there dirty, covered with fleas. And when he realized Odysseus was near, he wagged his tail, and both his ears dropped back. He was too weak to move towards his master…”
:(

“But he replied,
'Odysseus, you must not comfort me for death. I would prefer to be a workman,
hired by a poor man on a peasant farm,
than rule as king of all the dead.’”

“
“If we all got angry together something might be done.”
“

“
…Come,
sit on a chair, and let us hide our grief
inside ourselves, despite our bitter sorrow.
Nothing can be achieved by cold lamenting.
The gods have spun for all unlucky mortals
a life of grief, while nothing troubles them.
“

“…[Hephaestus] used a sponge to wipe his face, thick neck, and hairy chest and both his hands. Then he put on a tunic,
and took a sturdy staff and limped outside.
Slaves hurried to assist their lord. They were made all of gold, but looked like living women.
They had a consciousness inside their hearts,
and strength and voices. They had learned their skills from deathless gods. They sped beneath their master”

“And yet there was no ending of the war.”

“This was the greatest challenge faced by the bourgeoisie because (unlike fascism) socialism threatened the basic capitalist principle of private ownership of the means of production.”

“Then she unfastened the embroidered strap she kept between her breasts, on which was worked every seductive spell. It had lovemaking, intimacy, desire, and flirty talk-
flirtation makes the wisest lose their minds.”

“Undoubtedly, European capitalism achieved more and more a social character in its production… [while] distribution was not social in character. The fruits of human labor went to a given minority class, which was of the white race and resident in Europe and North America. This is the crux of the dialectical process of development and underdevelopment, as it evolved over the colonial period.”

“If one accepts that the government is always the servant of a particular class, it is perfectly understandable that the colonial governments should have been in collusion with capitalists to siphon off surplus from Africa to Europe. But even if one does not start from that…premise, it would be impossible to ignore the evidence of how the colonial administrators worked…on behalf of the big capitalists.”

“Look for the helpers. It was a goddamned Mr. Rogers quote, told to a child to comfort them during times of upheaval. But damn if it wasn't true.”

“LOUIS: I think we're like the size of a lego.
PREPOTENTE: The width of a standard LEGO® brick is 15.8 millimeters. I would guess we're slightly larger, but that's a very good estimate.
LOUIS: How did you type the registered-mark thing?
DONUT: AND WHY?”

“If you go to war against drugs, drugs will always win. Drugs will win because what you're really doing is going to war against the biological imperative all living creatures have to find comfort and happiness. And if you're unwilling or unable to first provide that, artificial alternatives, no matter how destructive, will always prevail.”

“What is man in the last analysis — his philosophy— or himself!?”

“She was a level 69 Swiftie, which, much to Donut's dismay, was a dexterity-based knife wielder.”