“Last night, with my lids pulled over me, I went on seeing as if I were an open window. Full of wind. I wasn’t lying in peaceful darkness, that darkness I desired, that peace I needed. My whole head was lit with noises, yet no Sunday park could have been more lonely: thoughts tossed away, left like litter to be blown away and lost. There were long avenues of footfall, leaf flutter lacking leaf or tree, barks unreturned to dogs.”
William Gass, knocking me on my ass in his novel, “The Tunnel”
“It is not necessary to remind you that the fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.”
Edward R. Murrow

Why freedom fries stayed french fries…

This is not really a post about freedom fries. It’s a post about liberty cabbage—

I just came across a nice quote by H.L. Mencken in his book The American Language, which I’ve been flipping through for sport. It’s a talking point I wish I had on hand a decade ago. Here it is:

The effort to substitute liberty-cabbage for sauerkraut, made by professional patriots in 1918, was a complete failure. It is a fact often observed that loan-words, at least on the level of the common speech, seldom reprisent the higher aspirations of the creditor nation.

“Immodesty thrives on Facebook and Twitter because they enable what social scientists call self-enhancement — the human tendency to oversell ourselves. But they also nurture a sense of mutual admiration that the offline world often does not. Social networking tends to create self-reinforcing spirals of reciprocal kindness. You like my cat pictures, so I celebrate your job promotion. The incentives tend to be stacked against negativity, and in some cases implicitly discourage it. In the Facebook world, we can Like or Hide things, but there’s no Dislike button — even when you need one.”
From The Delicate Dance of Online Bragging, published in Wired

(Source: twitter.com)

“Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.”
Malcolm Gladwell, from Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted
“It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”

Margaret Atwood

(from Whiskey River)

(Source: crashinglybeautiful)

“Whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace—whatever works. And don’t kid yourself, it’s by no means all up to your own human ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck than you’d like to admit. Christ, do you know the odds of your father’s one sperm from the billions, finding the single egg that made you? Don’t think about it. You’ll have a panic attack.”
Larry David as BorisYellnikoff in Whatever Works (which I finally saw this week)
“Your social life ain’t no better than my hot dog stand … your edu-ma-cation ain’t no hipper than what you understand.”

Dr. John, from a brilliant little number called “Qualified.”

“In a large number of cases, we sent reporters over on what we called ‘participatory journalism’ assignments. We’d carry guns. If we were shot at, we shot back. We didn’t hide behind a log.”

From a fascinating and completely insane interview with the guy behind Soldier of Fortune magazine.

(Thanks, Bidoun!)

“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: Writers are always selling somebody out.”
Joan Didion, from We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
“The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel, from The Sabbath (because what the hell, it’s  a Sunday night!)
“Anarchy is a beautiful thing if people have very fucking high morals.”
A man called Lionheart, from the fabulous Porter Fox Believer article The Last Stand of Free Town.
“I do read for the fun of it, thank God”

Lewis Lapham, editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, and editor emeritus and national correspondent for Harper’s magazine.

(via theatlantic)