The intellectual equivalent of a ham sandwich.

Posts tagged ‘book’

Quotes of the Day!

The following quotes are from The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. (The last book club book.)

 

And you can tell from the way she’s moving: she is heading towards. Maman just went by in the direction of the front door, she’s going out shopping and in fact she already is outside, her movement anticipating itself. I don’t really know how to explain it, but when we move, we are in a way de-structured by our movement towards something: we are both here and at the same time not here because we’re already in the process of going somewhere else, if you see what I mean.

 

(Let me say, before this quote, that the book club is all female except for myself … But I still like this quote.)

Let me explain: if, thus far, you have imagined that the ugliness of ageing and conciergely widowhood have made a pitiful wretch of me, resigned to the lowliness of her fate – then you are truly lacking in imagination. I have withdrawn, to be sure, and refuse to fight. But within the safety of my own mind, there is no challenge I cannot accept. I may be indigent in name, position and appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess.

 

Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?

 

True novelty is that which does not grow old, despite the passage of time.

 

They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.

 

And secondly, a teenager who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of full adulthood, that’s like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian. And thirdly, it’s a really weird way of looking at life to want to become an adult by imitating everything that is most catastrophic about adulthood …

 

Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where – even though tomorrow we will die – we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now?

 

For art is emotion without desire.

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Quotes of the Day!

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Arizona State Revenue Source

Ok, Arizona, your money woes are solved. What’s that pot hole doing there? Fix it with our oodles of money! What about the damage left after that last haboob? No problemo!

Side note: a haboob, yes a HABOOB, is a “violent and oppressive wind blowing in summer.”

How will you make all of this money? Oh, it’s simple.

You see, Arizona is unique in a number of ways. One of which is it’s drivers license lifespan. In Texas, your license expires six years after you get it. In Alabama, four years later. In Arizona, your license expires when you turn sixty-five!

Let’s ignore how crazy that is and move on to something even crazier. From the website, “Arizona Drivers License Renewal Guide at DMV.org“:

If for some reason you didn’t make it into the DMV before you turned 65, there’s still time. As long as you go in to renew it within the year, the fee will still only be $10.

You can get a regular license at age 18, which means you would have had to have been too busy for forty-seven years. That’s pretty busy. My plan is simple:

Arizona requires that, if your license expires, you have to pay the ten dollars AND you have to give a reason for missing the deadline. Then, Arizona takes the best of the best for those reasons, and they put a simple book out once a year. It’ll be an annual must have. Look soon for “I was busy, OK? Volume 1.”

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Du Jour of the Week

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Quotes of the Day!

The quotes today are from John Steinbeck‘s Cannery Row.

***

Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.

And perhaps that might be the way to write this book – to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

but Alfred has triumphed over his environment and has brought his environment up with him

Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom.

While he was looking for a question Doc asked one. Hazel hated that, it meant casting about in his mind for an answer and casting about in Hazel’s mind was like wandering alone in a deserted museum. Hazel’s mind was choked with uncatalogued exhibits.

It had become his custom, each time he was deserted, to buy a gallon of wine, to stretch out on the comfortably hard bunk and get drunk. Sometimes he cried a little all by himself but it was luxurious stuff and he usually had a wonderful feeling of well-being from it.

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Quotes of the Day!

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