December 2011
5 posts
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When I entered the room, I found Miss Halcombe and an elderly lady seated at the luncheon-table. The elderly lady, when I was presented to her, proved to be Miss Fairlie’s former governess, Mrs. Vesey, who had been briefly described to me by my lively companion at the breakfast-table, as possessed of “all the cardinal virtues, and counting for nothing.” I can do little more...
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Gettysburg
Now there’s different kind of cats, you see. Now, like this here cat sittin’ over there, he probably a George Washington cat, you see. He dig George making it across the stream with the ice and stompin’ soldiers and all that. And that cat over there he probably a Benny Franklin cat, he probably - he’s with Benny Franklin.
But myself, I’m a Lincoln cat....
November 2011
11 posts
4 tags
It’s my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it’s the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don’t see the urgency myself.
-Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier
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Ursa Minor is almost certainly the most appalling place in the universe. Though it is excruciatingly rich, horrifyingly sunny and more full of wonderfully exciting people than a pomegranate is of pips, it can hardly be insignificant that when a recent edition of the magazine ‘Play Being’ headlined an article with the words “When You Are Tired of Ursa Minor You Are Tired of...
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Thus we better understand the curious implication assigned to the navigation of madmen and the prestige attending it. On the one hand, we must not minimize its incontestable practical effectiveness: to hand a madman over to sailors was to be permanently sure he would not be prowling beneath the city walls; it made sure that he would go far away; it made him a prisoner of his own departure. But...
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They had a very pretty property - enough, had their family been of reasonable limits to have allowed them a very gentlemanlike share of luxuries and change - enough for them to have indulged in a new carriage and better roads, an occasional month at Tunbridge Wells, and symptoms of the gout and a winter at Bath; - but the maintenance, education and fitting out of fourteen children demanded a very...
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October 2011
24 posts
7 tags
They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream. Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible...
One course alone is left open to me: to remember and believe. To maintain with all my might, within my memory, the tragedy of this room, because of the vast and painful consolation which has sometimes resounded in the depths of the abyss. I believe that confronting the human heart and the human mind, which are composed of imperishable longings, there is only the mirage of what they long for. I...
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We have the divinity of our immense misery; and our solitude, with its burden of thought, tears and smiles, is inevitably divine by virtue of its universality … Whatever our anguish and effort in the dark, and the futile toil of our incessant heart, and our ignorance and destitution, and the hurts which are other people, we must consider ourselves with a sort of devout respect. It is this...
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Lucinda can’t read poetry. She’s good, Sort of, at novels, though. The words, you know, Don’t sort of get in like Lucinda’s way. And then the story, well, you know, about Real people, fall in love, like that, and all. Sort of makes you think, Lucinda thinks.
-George Khairallah
How to make an intelligent blockbuster and not...
incognito1987:
Here are three absolute truths:
1. The world is round.
2. We are all going to die.
3. No one enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.
Oh, I know loads of people paid to see POTC3 (as I believe it is known in the industry). And some of them may claim to have enjoyed it. But they didn’t. Not really. They just think they did. As a film critic, an important part of my...
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“They should just clone ministers, so we’re born at 55 with no past and no flats...”
– Hugh Abbot
Series 1, Episode 3
(via fuckyeahthethickofit)
yaaaaay
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They held the universe to be a large suit of clothes, which invests everything: that the earth is invested by the air; the air is invested by the stars; and the stars are invested by the primum mobile. Look on this globe of earth, you will find it to be a very complete and fashionable dress. What is that which some call land, but a fine coat faced with green? or the sea, but a waistcoat of...
He saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to the big canvas, brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose visions and vanities were all fixed, like Percy’s, upon the world’s game; for whom the reality was a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water.
-John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
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Clive was a very big man, good-looking in a heavy Roman way, and just beginning to get fat. He had about him that sad, American air of vagueness which is always attractive; doubly attractive in one who possessed so much money. He was vague, wistful, a bit lost: dimly anxious to have a good time and uncertain how to set about getting it. He seemed never to be quite sure whether he was really...
September 2011
8 posts
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These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The “enemy” was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.
-Philip K Dick
Bloo
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What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk...
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In much the same spirit, although spanning a shorter period of time (several months as opposed to several years), another friend, R., told me of a certain out-of-the-way book that he had been trying to locate without success, scouring bookstores and catalogues for what was supposed to be a remarkable work that he very much wanted to read, and how, one afternoon as he made his way through the city,...
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August 2011
10 posts
4 tags
Her subject was the eye, the drama of watching and being watched, and her pieces exhibited the same qualities one found in Maria herself: meticulous attention to detail, a reliance on arbitrary structures, patience bordering on the unendurable. In one work, she hired a private detective to follow her around the city. For several days, this man took pictures of her as she went about her rounds,...
Go Round 2 yourself, mister. Also I cheated a bunch this time cos this year’s songs = best songs, and also I’m crazy like that, whoah
Karen Dalton - Little Bit Of Rain Richard Hell & the Voidoids - Love Comes In Spurts Black Uhuru - Black Uhuru Anthem Dennis Brown - (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay The Liminanas - Funeral Baby Patti Smith - Dancing Barefoot Howlin’...