Thursday, April 12, 2007

Obituarium: The Last From the Sixties?

Kurt Vonnegut died last night; he wrote:


We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies.
When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock.
My God, my God -- I said to myself, "It's the Children's Crusade."

__________________________

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

----------------------------------requiescat in pace, Kurt.----------

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

My favorite words 1: Miscelanea

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night:
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-
It gives a lovely light!

Edna St. Vincent Millay.

__________________________

L'art c'est ce qui rend la vie plus intéressante que l'art.

Gerard Fromanger

__________________________

"We are like tourists with guns."

(Anonymous USA National Guardsman; in Afghanistan)

__________________________

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked . . . angelhead hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dinamo in the machinery of night.

Allen Ginsberg

__________________________

The artist must make posterity believe he never lived.

Gustav Flaubert

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The intention of the historical avant-garde movements was defined as the destruction of art as an institution set off from the praxis of art.

Peter Burger

__________________________

Everything that isn't autobiographical is plagiarism.

Pedro Almodovar

__________________________

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.

Thomas Mann

__________________________

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

Andre Gide

__________________________

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.

Bret Easton Ellis

__________________________

If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't call it research, now, would we?

Albert Einstein

__________________________

You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless.
There is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through the end of the damn thing.

Ernest Hemingway

__________________________


Nenhum escritor gosta realmente de escrever.
Eu gosto de beber vinho e de amar: na minha idade eu não devería perder tempo com outras coisas, mas não consigo parar de escrever.
É uma doença.

Rubem Fonseca

__________________________

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.

Lao Tzu
__________________________

One writes because one does not know what one has to say, to try to find out what it is.

J. F. Lyotard

__________________________

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face - forever.

George Orwell

__________________________

You can't think your way to write action.
You can only act your way to write thinking.

David Milch

__________________________

I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull nothing replies to our anxious invocations.

Mary Shelley

__________________________

Keep remiding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

Andre Breton

_____________

I'm not an artist.
An artist makes an object. Me; it's not an object, I work in history.
I'm a storyteller.

Sebastião Salgado

__________________________

La inspiración existe, pero tiene que encontrarse trabajando.

Pablo Picasso

__________________________

I don't paint what I see, I paint what I know.

Pablo Picasso

__________________________

If you write a little everyday without hope eventually the shape of the story will appear.

Lord Tennison

__________________________

Le romancier médiocre fait ses romans d'après sa vie réelle, les bons d'après ses vies possibles.

Andre Gide

__________________________


He, too, has resigned his part
On the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

William Butler Yeats

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A common sense which denies the superiority of uncommon sense is systematic superficiality.

Northrop Frye

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L'Habitude es la synthèse originaire du temps, qui constitue la vie du présent qui passe; la Mémoire es la synthèse fondamentale du temps, que constitute l'être du passé, (ce qui fait passer le présent).

Gilles Deleuze

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No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it might lead.

John Stuart Mill

__________________________

If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write.

Rainer Maria Rilke

__________________________

Destroy my desire, blot out my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

__________________________

The literal details of writing involve one's own physiology or metabolism. You begin from a standing start and you have to accelerate yourself to the point of celebration where the words are coming - well, in order. All writing is generated by a certain minimum of ego: you must assume a position of authority in saying that the way I'm writing is the only way it happened. Writer's block, for example, is simply a failure of ego.

Norman Mailer

__________________________

Canta, oh Diosa, la gula del espectador.

Carlos Monsiváis

__________________________

Out, out, brief candle!
Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare

__________________________

God knows there are enough natural limits to human knowledge without our suffering willingly those that are enforced upon us by an ignorantly rationalized fear of experience . . .
Prudence restrains me. But as the past must sometimes be affronted so also must prudence sometimes be overruled. Caveat.

Alexander Trocchi

__________________________

Eternamente é ter éter na mente

Chacal

__________________________

Is there a life before death?

Seamus Heaney

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All my gestures try to overcome the irreflexive orthodoxy of my ancestors.

Hugo Pezzini

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