July 2011
8 posts
Play
Play
Play
Play
Play
Play
Play
September 2010
5 posts
“Pude callar y callar apra siempre, pero uno cree que quiere más porque cuenta secretos, contar parece tantas veces un obsequio, el mayor osequio que puede hacerse, la mayor lealtad, la mayor prueba de mor y de entrega.”
—Javier Marías, Corazón tan blanco
“el secreto que no se transmite no hace daño a nadie”
—Javier Marías, Corazón tan blanco
“No es solamente que los hijos tarden mucho en interesarse por quiénes fueron sus padres antes de conocerlos (…), sino que los apdres se acostumbran a no despertar curiosidad alguna y a callar sobre sí mismos ante sus vástagos, a silenciar quiénes fueron o acaso lo olvidan.”
—Javier Marías, Corazón tan blanco
“Alguien que, lo mismo que la vejez, hubiera ido aplazando siempre la puesta en práctica de sus seducciones, quizás apra no herir a nadie”
—Javier Marías, Corazón tan blanco
“[…] consider the common practice of students blogging, networking, or tweeting while listening to a speaker. At a recent lecture, I said: “The most important reason to stop multitasking so much isn’t to make me feel respected, but to make you exist. If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”
—The End of Human Specialness (via The Chronicle Review) (via detectivesalvaje)
August 2010
11 posts
“hay quien no conoce más fantasías que las cumplidas, quien no es capaz de imaginarse nada y es poco previsor por eso, imaginar evita muchas desgracias, quien anticipa su propia meurte rara vez se mata, quien anticipa la e los otros rara vez asesina”
—Javier Marías, Corazón tan blanco
“This one. I’d look at her when she wasn’t aware of it and I’d see she had the childlike manner of many promiscuous women.”
—Nadime Gordimer, The House Gun
“The unease they felt came from revealed knowledge that there are dangers, inherent, there in the young; dangers within existence itself. There is no segregation from them. And no-one can know, for another, even your child, what these destructives, these primal despairs and drives are.”
—Nadime Gordimer, The House Gun
“The army - the army. That was where the life-ethic the son had absorbed from the parents was reversed. When he did his army service he was taught to kill; whether disguised as parade ground drill, field manoeuvres, ballistics courses (the calibre of the gun found on the fern had been established), what was being given was licence to cause death.”
—Nadime Gordimer, The House Gun
“Women see things among themselves, about one another, that you have to belong to their sex to attribute, whether this attributions are just or not.”
—Nadime Gordimer, The House Gun
“State violence under the old, past regime had habituated its victims to it. People had forgotten there was any other way.”
—Nadime Gordimer, The House Gun
“The son had an air of impatience, the shifting gaze of one who wished the well-meaning to leave; an urgent need of some preoccupation, business with himself.”
—Nadime Gordimer, The House Gun
“But dread attends the unknown. Dread was a drug that came to them both not out of something administered out of her pharmacopeia; they calmly walked about without anything to say to one another along the corridors of the court, Harald stangind back for his wife Claudia with the politeness of a stranger as they found the right door, entered and shuffled awkwardly sideways to be seated on the benches.”
—Nadime Gordimer, The House Gun
“Et savez vous ce que c’est que l’Etat dont vous parlez?”
—Alexandre Dumas, Les Trois Mousquetaires
“On sait qu’il y a un die pour les invrognes et les amoureux.”
—Alexandre Dumas, Les Trois Mousquetaires
“Elle contempla un instan avec effroi cette figure stupide, d’une résolution invincible, comme celle des sots qui ont peur”
—Alexandre Dumas, Les Trois Mousquetaires
July 2010
32 posts
“To remember nothing,” they would say. “What more could one possibly ask of eternity?”
—Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting
“Could there be anything more sad and more lonely than remembering what terrible things the future will bring?”
—Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting
“You’re me!!!” I said, so loud it could have woken my dad.
“Bingo,” she said.
“”Ohhh,” I said.
And then, after a long time, my mom said, “Good night.”
“Good night.”
My mom said, “Good night.”
“Good night.”
And because my mom didn’t say anything for a long time, I said, “Good night.”
And then i said , “Good night.” —Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting
“Bingo,” she said.
“”Ohhh,” I said.
And then, after a long time, my mom said, “Good night.”
“Good night.”
My mom said, “Good night.”
“Good night.”
And because my mom didn’t say anything for a long time, I said, “Good night.”
And then i said , “Good night.” —Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting
“But we exist as the most powerful species on Earth because of our optimism”
—Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting
“I do not love famous nightclubs. They make me feel very cheerless and abandoned. I am applying that word correctly? Abandoned?”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“He knew that what he was doing was right, more right than anything he saw anyone do, and he knew that doing right often means feeling wrong, and if you find yourself feeling wrong, you’re probably doing right. But he also knew that there is an inflationary aspect to love, and should his mother, or Rose, or any of those who loved him found about about each other, they would not be able to help but feel of a lesser value. He knew that I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way I love no one else, and have never loved anyone else, and will never love anyone else. He knew that it is, by love’s definition, impossible to love two people.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“This is what the note said: Change”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“Taken together, our findings provide evidence for the provocative notion that having access to the best things in life may actually undermine one’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures. Our research demonstrates that a simple reminder of wealth produces the same deleterious effects as actual wealth on an individual’s ability to savor, suggesting that perceived access to pleasurable experiences may be sufficient to impair everyday savoring. In other words, one need not actually visit the pyramids of Egypt or spend a week at the legendary Banff spas in Canada for one’s savoring ability to be impaired—simply knowing that these peak experiences are readily available may increase one’s tendency to take the small pleasures of daily life for granted”
—Why Money Makes You Unhappy (via Wired Science) (via detectivesalvaje)
“Mientras una mano invisible palmeaba amistosamente su espalada, animándole: Si te conviertes en otro sin dejar de ser tú, ya nunca te sentirás solo”
—Juan Marsé, El amante bilingüe
“I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“And that’s the most sinister feature of the whole nutritionist project, graphically exemplified by McKeith: it’s a manifesto of rightwing individualism – you are what you eat, and people die young because they deserve it. They choose death, through ignorance and laziness, but you choose life, fresh fish, olive oil, and that’s why you’re healthy. You’re going to see 78. You deserve it. Not like them.”
—Ben Goldacre, What’s wrong with Dr Gill McKeith PhD (http://www.badscience.net/2007/02/ms-gillian-mckeith-banned-from-calling-herself-a-doctor/)
“The final time they made love, seven months before she killed herself and he married someone else, the Gypsy girl asked my grandfather how he arranged his books.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.”
—Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan, The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 33, Issue 2-3, June 2010, pp 61-83. [Vía Sasha Borovik] (via bluelephant)
“(And also, of course, I will have made my decision by the time you receive this letter. We have always communicated in this mismatched time.)”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“And the General shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when thing hit the ground still. Anything.” If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“Everyone performs bad actions. I do. Father does. Even you do. But a bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions. Grandfather is now dying because of his.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“With writing, we have second chances.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“I have been very dispirited for Brod. She is a good person in a bad world. Everyone is lying to her. Even her father who is not her true father. They are both keeping secrets from each other. I thought about this when you said that Brod “would never be happy and honest at the same time”. Do you feel this way?”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“
From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistaken for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut’s eyes.
In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - metropolies will be seen form space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with greater difficulty. Shtetls will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples, invisible.
” —Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“¡Cuidado, imbécil! se dijo con voz neutra, y de pronto no supo a quién pertenecía esa voz y se desconcertó, sufrió un amago de vértigo: la memoria del yo se le quedó escindida, en tierra de nadie, durante unos segundos angustiosos”
—Juan Marsé, El amante bilingüe
“Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“I knew him very well, and I wanted to go and tell him that I had a little less than cried too, just like him, and that no matter how much it seemed like he would never grow up to be a premium person like me, with many girls and so many famous places to go, he would. He would be exactly like me. And look at me, little Igor, the bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive in life is something you have earned.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“But his wife was his first and only love, and it was the nature of those from the tiny shtetl to forgive their first and only loves, so he forced himself to understand, or pretend to understand.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
