“Heterosexuality sucks, even as a board game.”
Gregg Araki, Totally F***ed Up
Category: Commonplace Book
Cocteau on Individuality
Rien n’est plus tenace que la déformation professionnelle.
Jean Cocteau, Orphée
Cunningham on Fate
Few fates are wholly disagreeable. If they were, we might do a better job of evading them.
Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World (Alice)
Montaigne on Judgment
We readily acknowledge in others an advantage in courage, in bodily strength, in experience, in agility, in beauty; but an advantage in judgment we yield to no one.
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Presumption”
Montaigne on Deciding Things
I can easily maintain an opinion but not choose one.
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Presumption”
Butler on Throwing People Away
The problem, of course, with throwing people away is that they don’t go away. They stay in the society that turned its back on them. And whether that society likes it or not, they find all sorts of things to do.
Octavia Butler
Abbott on Humane Scholarship
You should aspire to something better than the mere political use of the past or of the Other. Human scholarship aims to understand another world on its own terms and by that understanding to improve its own world. …We should see the subject of our research as a particular example of its own way of being human — good or bad, sightly or unsightly, politically correct or devastatingly evil.
Andrew Abbott, Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials
Brown on Not Copping-Out
…don’t make a ritual out of getting your head together…
Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
Rousseau on Walking
The free hours of my daily walks have often been filled with delightful contemplations which I am sorry to have forgotten. Such reflections as I have in future I shall preserve in writing; every time I read them they will recall my original pleasure.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker
Vuong on Loneliness
... & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.
—Ocean Vuong, "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong," Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Jemisin on storytelling
(This is not a digression.)
N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Melville on laughter
A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick, “Breakfast”
Lanier on the Self
You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
Vuong on Being Lost
Remember: the rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field — it was always there — where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous
Pullman on Liars
Being a practiced liar doesn’t mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it’s that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
—Philip Pullman, Northern Lights
Rousseau on Money
Money in one’s possession is the instrument of liberty; money one pursues is the symbol of servitude. That is why I hold fast to what I have, but covet no more.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions
Marcuse on Trump’s America
What we have is government, representative government by a non-intellectual minority of politicians, generals, and businessmen.
—Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance”
Klee on the Visible
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
Paul Klee
Mrs. Weasley on Social Media
What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.
Mrs. Weasley, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Leach on Aggression
Belligerence knows no tempo.
—Amy Leach, “Please Do Not Yell at the Sea Cucumber”