OK, guys & gals, time for my August collection of recently encountered quotes.
I have a difficult relationship with regeneration projects. All around me I watch as multi-million pound businesses build massive, overpriced penis extensions that loom over the patchwork of housing estates below, waiting to jizz all over them until at some stage, everyone will live on a dinghy in the Thames and have to catch eels with their toes to survive. The theme in Canary Wharf is to build empires of plate glass in which thousands of feet of marble clad floor are troubled only by a potted fig and three, uncomfortable Japanese chairs which nobody is allowed to sit on. Wealth here is measured by how much space you can squander.
[Katy Wheatley; https://katywheatley.substack.com/p/where-plaistow-patricia-meets-vera]
1. History is not there for you to like or dislike.
2. History is there for you to learn from it.
3. History offends you? Even better. Then you are less likely to repeat it.
Please read this out loud, then read it again. Then teach it to your children and grandchildren.
[Andrea Junker]
Surround yourself with people who make you happy. People who make you laugh, who help you when you’re in need. People who genuinely care. They are the ones worth keeping in your life. Everyone else is just passing through.
[Taylor Swift]
Human, the only species on Earth that shames its own body.
[Kendree Miller, Photographer]
“My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent.”
Hughnon reflected that “entirely transparent” meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn’t see them at all.
[Terry Pratchett; The Truth]
“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
[CS Lewis; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader]
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.
“In 1984“, Huxley added, “people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.”
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
[Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death]
“You know why trees smell the way they do?” Murphy asked, looking up from her hammering.
“Sap?” Logan guessed. “Chlorophyll?”
Murphy shook her head. “Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years’ worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That’s why trees smell so beautiful and old.”
[Frances O’Roark Dowell, Where I’d Like to Be]
Tranquillity comes when you stop caring what they say. Freedom comes when you stop caring what they think.
[Marcus Aurelius]
If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans. You’ve nothing to worry about there.
[James Herriot]
Have you ever heard that patter-pitter of tiny feet? Or the dong-ding of a bell? Or hop-hip music? That’s because, when you repeat a word with a different vowel, the order is always I A O. Bish bash bosh. So politicians may flip-flop, but they can never flop-flip. It’s tit-for-tat, never tat-for-tit. This is called ablaut reduplication, and if you do things any other way, they sound very, very odd indeed.
[Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence]
Meanwhile, time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.
[Martin Amis, The Information]
[NYT] couldn’t show any vibrators. America is a puritan country, remember? We have all these uptight evangelicals here.
[Marilyn Minter, interviewed in The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/aug/16/an-honest-depiction-of-elder-sex-marilyn-minters-best-photograph]
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
[Jimi Hendrix]
I can write down a few words and make people thousands of miles away, whom I have never met and will never meet, laugh tears of joy and cry tears of true sorrow for people who do not exist and have never existed and never will exist. If that isn’t actual literal magic I don’t know what is.
[Neil Gaiman]