Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends & we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.

–Kait Rokowski

One of the things I try to show my students is that historical grounding does not exclude being contemporary. The future is not the opposite of the past. It’s easy to think that, because language sets it up that way: Day is the opposite of night, up is the opposite of down, and therefore the future must be the opposite of the past. But it doesn’t actually work like that.

—Tobias Frere-Jones

In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

[A] novel is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. No other art can do that. No other art can capture the essential inwardness of human life.

–Paul Aster

(That said, in the future VR will be able to do that too, but oh how the traditionalists will howl. As they always do.)

Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.

–From an article by Gene Weingarten

Right wing Christian puritans only want you to feel bad about having sex. Liberal puritans seem to want you to feel bad about everything else.

–Lance Mannion

“If you asked people in 1989 what they needed to make their life better, it was unlikely that they would have said that a decentralized network of information nodes that are linked using hypertext.”

– Farmer & Farmer