The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger, 1984
Archive
Quotes
Punishment is a sort of medicine.
—Aristotle, c. 340 BCThe first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.
—Lester Bangs, 1971Machines seem to sense that I am afraid of them. It makes them hostile.
—Sharyn McCrumb, 1990There are twelve hours in the day, and above fifty in the night.
—Madame de Sévigné, 1671There is no blindness more insidious, more fatal, than this race for profit.
—Helen Keller, 1928My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.
—Benito Mussolini, 1929We wish away whole years, and travel through time as through a country filled with many wild and empty wastes, which we would fain hurry over, that we may arrive at those several little settlements or imaginary points of rest which are dispersed up and down in it.
—Joseph Addison, 1711The gods play games with men as balls.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCA tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?
—Ronald Reagan, 1965“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964When the abbot throws the dice, the whole convent will play.
—Martin Luther, c. 1540The Mediterranean has the colors of a mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet—you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing light has taken on a tinge of pink or gray.
—Vincent van Gogh, 1888