COLE SMITH
Diary
9 / 4 / 25
Quotes, Passages, Dialogues...
No, no, Lou was not such a fool as she looked, in his eyes anyhow.
She knew what she wanted.
She wanted relief from the nervous tension and irritation of her life, she wanted to escape from the friction which is the whole stimulus in modern social life.
She wanted to be still: only that, to be very, very still, and recover her own soul.
- D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr
Indeed, it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains, to strive to stand on ever higher ground to gaze farther into the distance.
It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival.
Had you, for example, only been concerned with staying alive, you would have fled from this mountain as fast and as far away as you could.
Instead, you chose to climb it.
The reason evolution bestows all intelligent life with a desire to climb higher is far more profound than mere base needs, even though we still do not understand its real purpose.
Mountains are universal, and we are all standing at the foot of mountains.
- Cixin Liu, Mountain
At one point he said, "You know, your mother's friends will be coming to keep vigil too. It's customary. I have to go and get some chairs and some black coffee."
I asked him if he could turn off one of the lights. The glare on the white walls was making me drowsy.
He said he couldn't.
That was how they'd been wired: it was all or nothing.
- Albert Camus, The Stranger
[...] all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine.
You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it.
You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true.
You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases.
At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-coloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron.
All this is good and I wait for you to continue.
But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus.
You explain this world to me with an image.
I realise then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.
Have I the time to become indignant?
You have already changed theories.
So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.
What need had I of so many efforts?
The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more.
I have returned to my beginning.
I realise that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot for all that apprehend the world.
Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more.
And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure.
A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing
to know and live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?
To will is to stir up paradoxes.
Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart or fatal renunciations.
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
[...] what could be more disillusioned than such sayings as “Charity begins at home” or “Promote a rogue and he’ll sue you for damage, knock him down and he’ll do you homage”?
We all know how many common sayings can be quoted to this effect, and they all mean much the same – that you must not oppose the powers that be; that you must not fight against superior force; must not meddle in matters that are above your station.
Or that any action not in accordance with some tradition is mere romanticism; or that any undertaking which has not the support of proven experience is foredoomed to frustration; and that since experience has shown men to be invariably inclined to evil, there must be firm rules to restrain them, otherwise we shall have anarchy.
It is, however, the people who are forever mouthing these dismal proverbs and, whenever they are told of some more or less repulsive action, say “How like human nature!” – it is these very people, always harping upon realism, who complain that existentialism is too gloomy a view of things.
Indeed their excessive protests make me suspect that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism, but, much more likely, our optimism.
For at bottom, what is alarming in the doctrine that I am about to try to explain to you is – is it not? – that it confronts man with a possibility of choice.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
Is there ever going to be a way to combine the structure of the silent movie with the quick presentation of a TV commercial?
Somewhere, somebody has to be able to take the wonderful ecomonic structural possibilities of the silent movie with the tremendous power that a good TV commercial can generate on a topic in 30 seconds.
I think this would be the most exciting thing that happened since whoever it was cut the two first pieces of film together and realised you could have 'editing.'
It really needs, sort of like, an editing of the mind—which hasn't happened—to just tell the story in a different way.
The real explosion will come when someone finally liberates the narrative structure.
- Stanley Kubrick, A Voix Nue
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