December 2010
34 posts
“You don’t have to be poor to play the blues, but even if you are poor, you...”
i want this book, if only because i love the... →
“Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a...”
– Lorrie Moore
In the end we will conserve only what we love. We... →
Baba Dioum
how to attract women in 2011 →
how to become a writer, by lorrie moore
First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star
missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is
best if you fail at an early age — say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that
at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry
blossom, a...
“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s...”
– Susan Sontag
“It now lately seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could...”
– David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul.”
– Kahlil Gibran
“You know what you are? You’re God’s answer to Job, y’know? You...”
– Woody Allen, Manhattan
funeral blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my...
“A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.”
– George Bernard Shaw (via libraryland)
“What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and...”
– Philip Larkin, Days (via thebronzemedal)
“A woman should know how to look like a girl, how to act like a lady, how to...”
– Zadie Smith (via shakespeare-in-love)
1 tag
lines for fortune cookies
I think you’re wonderful and so does everyone else. Just as Jackie Kennedy has a baby boy, so will you—even bigger. You will meet a tall beautiful blonde stranger, and you will not say hello. You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone. You will marry the first person who tells you your eyes are like scrambled eggs. In the beginning there was YOU—there will always be...
“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”
– David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
the best take i've read on NASA's "arsenic... →
NASA and AAAS drop the ball when it comes to science journalism…ungh…
“Losing yourself in a book, the old phrase, is not an idle fantasy but an...”
– Susan Sontag
“The value of a piece of fiction depends in the final analysis on the personality...”
– W. Somerset Maugham
“Her mixture of wide-eyed wonder and cuddly drugged sexiness seemed to get to...”
– Pauline Kael on Marilyn Monroe
“To be is to do.” - Socrates
“To do is to be.” - Jean Paul Sartre
“Do be do be do…” - Frank Sinatra
(Kurt Vonnegut)