How great the barriers can be between a person and his happiness,
How little it can take to make them seem small.

Marisa Silver (paraphrased)

After years of waiting nothing came
As your life flashed before your eyes
You realize

I'm a reasonable man
Get off my case

Radiohead, Packt Like Sardines

Tell us what we did wrong and you can blame us for it.

Andrew Bird, Heretics.

"This shit would be really interesting if we weren't in the middle of it."

Barack Obama, September 2008 (as quoted in Game Change).

When you get there, you get there and that's the way it goes.

Otis Taylor

What experience and history teach is this: people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

G.W.F. Hegel

Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty.

Jean Shepherd

You can only take what you can carry.

Snow Patrol

The history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles...but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years.

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

[E]veryone wants to be the center of the universe.

Colin Negrych as quoted by Nick Palmgarten

[A] mortal soul, the non-corporeal essence of ourselves lurking within our flesh...flourishing when we flourish, and dying when we die.

Salman Rushdie, "In the South"

Both in the May 18, 2009 New Yorker.

From now on, you are you.


Mahmoud Darwish, From Now On You Are You

Whatever destiny demands of us, we and only we can decide whether to endure with noble fortitude or not. We do not wish for evils, but we can endure them.

John C. Wright, The Golden Age

And I think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no, I'm a rocket man

Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
And I think it's gonna be a long long time...

Elton John, Rocket Man

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

I do not want this world. I do not like this world. I do not need this world. I do not need to feel sympathetic for this world or its inhabitants. If only they did not need me...

A fictional agent of the UN Security Council in Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

The God of Small Things....If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

No beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.


William Gibson

It's just another day in paradise
As you stumble to your bed
You'd give anything to silence
Those voices ringing in your head
You thought you could find happiness
Just over that green hill
You thought you would be satisfied
But you never will-
Learn to be still

We are like sheep without a shepherd
We don't know how to be alone
So we wander 'round this desert
And wind up following the wrong gods home
But the flock cries out for another
And they keep answering that bell
And one more starry-eyed messiah
Meets a violent farewell-
Learn to be still
Learn to be still

Now the flowers in your garden
They don't smell so sweet so sweet
Maybe you've forgotten
The heaven lying at your feet

There are so many contradictions
In all these messages we send
(We keep asking)
How do I get out of here?
Where do I fit in?
Though the world is torn and shaken
Even if your heart is breakin'
It's waiting for you to awaken
And someday you will-
Learn to be still
Learn to be still

You just keep on runnin'
Keep on runnin'

The Eagles, Learn to be Still

You, who are on the road must have a code that you can live by.
And so become yourself because the past is just a good bye.

CSN&Y, Teach Your Children

The latest findings highlight once again the extent to which obesity is a consequence of Homo sapiens carrying into an era of abundance, leisure and warmth the physiology that humans evolved in a world marked by barely enough food, constant physical activity and dangerous cold.

From a Washington Post article on brown fat.

In short, the key to the salvation of the West was the Persian defeat by the Greeks, which required a victory at Salamis, which in turn could not have occurred without the repeated efforts—all against opposition—of a single Athenian statesman. Had he wavered, had he been killed, or had he lacked the moral and intellectual force to press home his arguments, it is likely that Greece would have become a satrapy of Persia.

Victor Davis Hanson on Themistocles in “No Glory That Was Greece” in What If?, edited by Robert Cowley

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.

Practice is when everything works but nobody knows why.

Unknown

A man so often only finishes a house by turning it into a tomb.

G.K.Chesterton, The Scandal of Father Brown.

Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.

Bishop Joseph Butler

When you are happy, it's surprising how much you can drink.


From a friend from North Mitrovica -- soon to get married -- over coffee at DV.

There are times that we cannot seem to find our center. We have to find someplace to stand at the edges of ourselves. This seems the only place for us to exist and get through day-to-day. We cannot do this for so long but if we had a choice, we'd probably try to get closer in where it is more comfortable.

Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.

Salman Rushdie, “The Shelter of the World,” The New Yorker of Feb. 25,2008

Human purpose may be a long-evolved consequence of the thermodynamic tendency to come to equilibrium....the process of life -- complexity building in the area of gradients, and energy flow -- is a natural phenomenon....life's natural purpose.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life

In most systems diversity begets stability.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life

When the energy available for the formation of complex systems is taken away, these systems revert to a more primitive level of function.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life

The sensing selves of the biosphere were brought into being, and are maintained, by thermodynamic potential and the molecular informational complexity necessary to tap it....Organisms may be seen as connectable nodes that transform the environment as they mediate energetic flows....Quickly growing systems -- ones that through evolution, technology, or both. tap into previously unrecognized or untapped gradients -- may spread like wildfire. But like raging flames, they rob themselves of their own resources.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life (pg. 158-59)

What we call life is neither a thing apart from matter, nor merely "living matter," but an informational and energetic process...

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life

Whenever a gradient is applied to a system, insofar as constraints allow, the gradient is spontaneously degraded as completely as possible. Constraints, of course, are not trivial. In life they entail extremely complex feedback loops as energy is channeled through chemical kinetics….Constraints regulate dynamic processes, but they don’t cause them.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life (pg. 123)

Far-from-equilibrium systems pay for their reduced entropy by exporting a concomitant increase in entropy into the surrounding environment….All organisms, not just human technological ones, produce waste.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life

The real purpose of a [cell] phone, as everyone knows, is texting. Only techno-tards make actual phone calls -- unless they need to lie.

Patricia Marx, The New Yorker of March 10, 2008.

…the very origins of life can be traced to the energy flows of an energetic universe…Deep in the chemical cycles of present-day bacteria are metabolic pathways, chemical traces repeating, with variation, the steps by which matter came to life…paints a picture of energy-rich matter maintaining and making more of itself before genes evolved….The bodies and selves we consider living derive from complex cycles of energy transformation, cycles that only later developed genes….Life displays directional processes such as expansion, increase of taxa, and increased energy use over time that do not square with … random process.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life (pgs. xii-xiii)

I'm not reacting well, am I? Perhaps I should be grateful to still be sane.

Greg Bear, Eternity.

No one loves an armed missionary.

Robespierre, as quoted by Colin Jones in the NYRB of December 20, 2007.

Any life that ends in exile cannot have been totally mediocre.

Quoted by Simon Leys in the New York Review of December 20, 2008

Love is not a simple relation to someone else; it is always an attitude, a view of the world, a character trait.

Slobodan Selenic, Fathers and Forefathers

Some men relate what they think, as what they know.

Though defective in practice, he was religious in principle.

Samuel Johnson, on two separate occasions, to James Boswell in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

You must provide yourself with a good deal of extraneous matter, which you are to produce occasionally, so as to fill up the time; for you must consider, that they do not listen much. If you begin with the strength of your cause, it may be lost before they begin to listen. When you catch a moment of attention, press the merits of the question upon them."

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson, upon being asked for advice on how to speak to the House of Commons.

The world has few greater pleasures than that which two friends enjoy, in tracing back, at some distant time, those transactions and events through which they have passed together.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

Faced with lies
Don't you think that you just lie?

The Secret Machines, Faded Lines

Outsiders find themselves hard pressed to explain the political passions of the Serbs. Having reduced complex political relations to vulgar, petty squabbles, the Serb is not inclined to weigh the contradictions between individual and common interests in the most efficient and just manner. Lust for power, a Byzantine brand of power, in a form limited by no constraints whatsoever, informs the vision of each and every political hack and local government agent as much as it moves the prime minister and leader of the opposition. Politics in Yugoslavia are not conducted for the purpose of achieving some tangible goal...[but] so that the parties can harangue one another to the point of exhaustion, or lunacy.

Slobodan Selenic, Fathers and Forefathers

Human thinking develops in leaps. Such a leap may germinate for a while in our subconscious, but then it happens in a flash, like an epiphany....Duration is in fact a state of constant flux. There is no spiritual state identical to itself from minute to minute. With each new moment, something has been added to the one before. As he endures, a man is constantly shaping a new self. A person can stop changing only when he stops existing. Though my memory is constantly nudging thoughts, feelings, wishes, from the just abandoned past into the emerging present, I am not aware of this. The changes are too minuscule for my crude perceptive apparatus, and the weight of personal dogma too great to acquiesce without resistance. So it is only when the outcome of the change is noticeable, and when the contradictions inherent to my thinking and behavior have reshaped and reconciled themselves to a new sequence, at last, with some semblance of harmony, that I register the change as a shift from one state of mind to another.

Slobodan Selenic, Fathers and Forefathers

No man may place his hopes in anyone but God and his own hands.

A Balkan proverb, as quoted in Father and Forefathers by Slobodan Selenic.

Fear always runs the State Department. They always follow what they are most afraid of.

Averell Harriman, as quoted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, New York Review of Books of October 11, 2007.

[T]he main purpose of human association was to share enjoyment of the world's absurdity.

Auberon Waugh on his father Evelyn as quoted by John Banville in "The Family Pinfold," New York Review of Books of June 28, 2007

I always fare the best with my innocuousness, which is up to 20 percent conscious. This is easily attained when you're indifferent to the feelings of your dear fellow humans—but you are never as indifferent to them as they deserve.

Albert Einstein as quoted by Lee Smolin in "The Other Einstein" on how he keeps his cool, in the New York Review of Books, June 14, 2007.

The security of a position depends less on the elaborate construction of its approach routes and the depths of the firing trench than on the freshness and undiminished courage of the men defending it.

Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel

...and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers to these fundamental questions, it was good for us to ask them anyway; that true happiness and meaning resided in places we would never find and perhaps did not wish to find.

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City

The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse.

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City

By doing what was necessary to keep the settlers alive, John Smith became the person most feared by investors and bureaucrats through the ages: the man on the scene who does not hesitate to exceed his instructions.

Edmund S. and Marie Morgan, “Our Shaky Beginning’s,” NYRB of April 26, 2007

Our thoughts are just the building material with which we construct a house around ourselves to protect us and separate us from the world. It is unfortunate that they cannot do so, for they are soft and flexible and not intended for this. What the purpose of thought is we have not yet determined.

Milorad Pavic, Unique Item

E-mail isn’t the most self-conscious medium; haste and volume encourage many correspondents to forget themselves. Still, everyone settles on a style. The lower-case non-punctuators, the serial capitalizers, the rhetorical questioners, the subpoena-anticipators, the posterity-watchers: they all have their reasons, and their conceits.

Nick Paumgarten, “Elements of E-Style,” The New Yorker of April 16, 2007

Man is damned, and regrets all the paths he never took.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Governance, as Shakespeare imagines it, is an immense weight whose great emblem is the insomnia that afflicts the competent [and] tough-minded.

Stephen Greenblatt, "Shakespeare & the Uses of Power," New York Review of Books (April 12, 2007)

A man isn’t a tree, and being settled in one place is his misfortune. …Digging oneself in marks the real beginning of old age, because a man is young as long as he isn’t afraid to make new beginnings.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

We often spin like weathervanes, unsure of our positions, mad with insecurity. We vacillate between despair and the wish for peace and don’t know what is ours. It’s difficult to stop at either end, to embrace only one side, but that’s what we need to do. Any decision, except the one that will disturb our conscience, is better than the sense of disorientation with which indecision bestows us. But the decision shouldn’t be hurried; it should just be helped to develop. When the time comes. Friends can ease the pain of making a decision, but no more.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Life always sinks downward. It takes effort to avoid that. The idea drags it down because it begins to contradict itself. And then a new idea is developed, an opposing one, and it is good until it begins to be turned into reality. What is, is not good; what is good is what is desired. When people come across a pretty thought they should keep it under glass, so it won’t get dirty.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Life is life, one is just like another, everyone seeks happiness, but troubles come on their own.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

It is difficult until you make up your mind, all obstacles seem impassable, all difficulties insurmountable. But once you shrug off your indecision, when you defeat your faintheartedness, then unimagined paths open up in front of you, and the world is no longer cramped and threatening. I imagined heroic feats, discovering many an opportunity for genuine courage, prepared tricks that would have deceived even the greatest caution. And I became more excited and agitated as I became more certain, in the depths of my heart and in the remote folds of my brain, that all of this was just empty dreaming…. My hidden instincts, which protected me even without my conscious will, generously granted me such beautiful, noble thoughts, without curtailing them: they knew these thoughts were not dangerous, that they could not turn into deeds.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Human thought is an unsteady wave that is stirred and calmed by the capricious winds of fear or desire.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

We are not aware when new beginnings arrive; we only discover them later when they have already engulfed us, when everything merely continues. Then we believe that everything could have been different, but it could not have.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Everything changes when a man loses his bearings.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

I think it was at this period that my own talk began to upset me. The words I uttered seemed like false smiles I was displaying at a party I’d gone to against my will. Sometimes I would overhear myself in the act of speech, like a man who suddenly sees himself in a mirror. Then I grew afraid….I began to wonder whether anything I had ever said was what I had wanted to say. I began to wonder whether anything I had ever written was what I had wanted to write, or whether what I had wanted to write was underneath, trying to push its way through….Sometimes I imagine that if we were very still we could hear, rising from the forests and oceans, the quiet laughter of animals, as they listen to us talk….I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

Steven Millhauser, History of A Disturbance in the New Yorker of March 5, 2007

I mentioned to him a friend of mine who was formerly gloomy from low spirits, and much distressed by the fear of death, but was now uniformly placid, and contemplated his dissolution without any perturbation. "Sir, (said Johnson,) this is only a disordered imagination taking a different turn."

James Boswell in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

I began my fickle refutation…with pleasure, realizing maybe for the first time that the heavens and the secrets of the universe, that the secrets of death and existence were the most convenient region into which one could escape from the cares of this world. If they did not exist, one would need to invent them as a refuge.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Nothing would improve if things were different in our lives.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

(Or as Buckeroo Banzai once put it, no matter where you go, there you are.)

I would often say:

Death is a change of state. The soul begins to live by itself. Until it parted from the body, it held with hands, saw with eyes, heard with ears, but it knew the heart of the matter on its own.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

The river resembles me: sometimes turbulent and foaming, more often calm and inaudible. I was sorry when they dammed it up below the tekke and diverted it into a trench to make it obedient and useful, so it would run through a trough and drive a mill wheel. And I was happy when it swelled, destroyed the dam, and flowed free. I knew all the while that only tamed waters can mill wheat.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Against the vast background of the deserted land he saw his insignificance only too clearly--a vain, petty man, envious and scheming, an opportunist, a fraud.... What had he done with his life--other than seek a transient peace between the legs of women. He had, in order to live another day, and then another, served the people who now did what they did and who would, he knew for a certainty, do what they would do.

Alan Furst, Dark Star

There are doors that let you in
And out
But never open.

Radionhead, "Pull / Pulk Revolving Doors," Amnesiac

To have defended ourselves when we didn’t need to is one of the first things for which we need to forgive ourselves--as well as others.

Mutual Injury and Mutual Acknowledgement (Lecture in Honor of Andrew Samuels, World in Transition Conference, London, October 2006), Jessica Benjamin.

Instincts are misleading
You shouldn't think what you're feeling
They don't tell you what you know you should want.

Death Cab for Cutie, "Lightness", Transatlanticism

I never knew a man who was so generally acceptable. He made every body quite easy, overpowered nobody by the superiority of his talents, made no man think worse of himself by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oblige you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what you said. Every body liked him; but he had no friend, as I understand the word, nobody with whom he exchanged intimate thoughts.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

All grief for what cannot in the course of nature be helped, soon wears away; in some sooner, indeed, in some later; but it never continues very long, unless where there is madness.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

Some change in the form of life, gives from time to time a new epocha of existence. In a new place there is something new to be done, and a different system of thoughts rises in the mind.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

When you live near a mini-golf course,you know you are too far into suburbia.

Galluchman

He’d never have believed he could become detached so quickly from the ordinary world—after only a few months’ absence. He’d heard about former employees in the Palace of Dreams who had in a manner of speaking withdrawn from life while they were still alive, and who, whenever they found themselves among people they used to know, looked as if they had just come down from the moon.

Ismail Kadare, The Palace of Dreams

For there is no man’s reality around us that someone else is not dreaming about somewhere in this human ocean tonight, nor is there somebody’s dream that is not becoming the reality of another.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

You are like the girl who always rose late; when she married in the next village and for the first time had to rise early, she saw the hoarfrost on the fields and said to her mother-in-law, "We don’t have that in our village!" Like her, you think there is no love in the world, because you have never been awake early enough to encounter it, although every morning it is there on time....

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

And then I realized there was no more shutting of your eyes to the truth, no salvation in being blindfolded, no dream and reality, no being awake or asleep. Everything is one and the same continuing eternal day and world, coiling around you like a snake. That is when I saw vast, remote happiness as being small but close; when I perceived the great cause as empty, and the small as my love….

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

A person’s acts in life are like meals, and his thoughts and feelings like seasoning. Whoever puts salt on cherries or pours vinegar on sweets will fare poorly….

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

One of the sure paths to the real future (because there is also a false future) is to proceed in the direction of your fear.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

But I tell you all this in vain, for you carry your eyes in your mouth and do not see until you speak.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

He who reaches the end of a road needs it no longer, and the road is not given to him any more.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

It is only an illusion that our thoughts are in our heads....Our heads and we as a whole are in our thoughts. We and our thoughts are like the sea and the stream that runs through it—our body is the current in the sea, but our thoughts are the sea itself. Hence the body makes room for itself in the world by forging through thoughts. And the soul is the seabed of one and the other....

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

He could see that all his reflections, forethought and his easy mental reconciliation were not worth much and did not help at the moment when the blow fell. For, it is one thing to project your fears in your imagination, to foresee the worst, to work out your attitude and your defense; and at the same time to feel the satisfaction that all is still in order and in its place. It is quite another to find yourself facing an actual breakdown which demands urgent decisions and concrete actions.

...it was difficult not to think, not to remember, not to see. He had spent twenty-five years looking for "the middle way" which would bring peace of mind and give a person the dignity he could not live without. For twenty-five year he had been moving from one "elation" to another, seeking and finding, losing and gaining, and now he had arrived, exhausted, inwardly rent, worn out, back at the point from which he had set out....This meant that all the paths were only apparently going forward, but were in fact leading in a circle, like the deceptive labyrinths of oriental tales, and so they had brought him, tired and faint-hearted, to this place, among the torn papers and jumbled copies, to the point where the circle began again, as from every other point. This meant there could be no middle path, that true path leading forward, into stability, peace and dignity, but that we weretravelinglling in a circle, always along the same, deceptive path, and only the people and the generations change as they travel, constantly deceived....One just travels. And the road has meaning and dignity only in so far as we are able to find those qualities in ourselves. There is no path or purpose. One just travels. Travels and exhausts oneself.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

The destiny of all these foreigners, cast up and crammed into this narrow, damp valley and condemned to live in unusual conditions for an unknown length of time, now came to an abrupt maturity. The strange circumstances into which they had been thrown speeded up inner processes already at work in them, driving each of them with more relentless force in the direction of his impulses. The way these impulses developed and were manifested here was different in both degree and form than might have been the case in any other circumstances.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

Both the ill-will and the goodness of a people are the product of the circumstances in which they live and develop….I become more and more convinced of how wrong we are…to seek to introduce everywhere our own attitudes, our exclusively rational way of life and government. It seems to me more and more a senseless waste of effort. For it’s pointless to want to remove all abuses and preconceptions if you haven’t the strength or ability to remove what caused them.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

During the day…he was a calm, decisive man, with a definite name, profession and rank, a clear aim and set tasks which were the reason for his coming to this remote Turkish province.…But at night, he was both all that he was now and all that he had ever been or should have been. And that man, lying in the darkness of the long February nights, seemed to…himself a stranger, complex, and at times quite unknown.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

In poetry or politics, a Romantic with a sense of the ridiculous can do great great things.

Adam Gopnik, “Life of the Party: Benjamin Disraeli and the politics of performance,” New Yorker, July 3, 2006

Racin' with the risin' tide to my father's door….
Drownin' in the risin' tide in my father's door….
Racin' from the risin' tide to my father's door….

BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB, “Fault Line”, Howl

Hell is Truth Seen Too Late

Thomas Hobbes

"We’re not stupid! We’re just poor! And we have the right to insist on this distinction.”

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

...if possibility of evil be to exclude good, no good ever can be done. If nothing is to be attempted in which there is danger, we must all sink into hopeless inactivity.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

...as he sank below the crust of the visible world, into his dazzling kingdom, he understood that he had travelled a long way from the early days, that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be difficult and without forgiveness.

Steven Millhauser, "In the Reign of Harad IV," The New Yorker (April 10, 2006)