Voices in My Head

[W]hat a meditative poem contributes to the history of consciousness is a reenactment in real time of the volatile inner life of a human being. Such a poem does not present itself as plot or character portrayal or argument, but rather ... as a hypothesis .... and include[s] waverings, self-contradictions, repudiations, aspirations, and doubts; they are not offered as a philosophical system.

Helen Vendler,  The New York Review of Books (February 23, 2017)

The first step in dealing with the madness of the political world is not to let it make you crazy.... Fanaticism always seems foolish until it locks you up.

Adam Gopnik, Mixed Up: Montaigne On Trial (New Yorker, Jan 16, 2017)

During his later years he has often said—and many a man has had, and will have, to say the same—that he had learned these people too late.

Sir Richard Francis Burton, Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome

All economies have winners and losers. It does not take a sophisticated algorithm to figure out that the winners in the decades ahead are going to be those who own the robots, for they will have vanquished labor with their capital.

 Sue Halpern, Our Driverless Future (New York Review of Noveber 24, 2016)

Modern media ... have always been based on the reselling of human attention to advertisers. 
 
Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review (October 27, 2016)

If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

The flight went really well and the only issue was when it landed.

From a spokesman for a airship with some problems (August 2016).

Oh, if and, if and when you get into the end zone
Act like you've been there a thousand times before

The Tragically Hip, Heaven is a Better Place

Gnostics.... We maintain that the world is an illusion. The unconscious self is consubstantial with perfection, but because of a tragic fall it is thrown into a foreign domain that is completely alien to its true being. It’s always a fall, a tragic fall, and here we are. That’s it, in a nutshell.

Stuff, Joy Williams (The New Yorker, July 25, 2016)

It is axiomatic in the art of war that the side which remains behind its fortified line is always defeated.

Napoleon Bonaparte

As we move up our space/time-line, what will be has been, what has been remains, now is just now.

An errant thought.

Creatures of a day, what is anyone?  What is he not?  Man is but a dream of a shadow.  Yet when there comes as a gift of heaven a gleam of sunshine, there rest upon men a radiant light.

Pindar, Odes for Victorious Athletes

Who can fathom the soundless depths?

Jules Verne, riffing on the Book of Ecclesiastes in his 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Capitalism is a partnership between governors and merchants that secures the power of both.... merchants grow rich because state power protects them or looks away when the time is right.

Martha Howell, The New York Review (April 7, 2016)

Complaining doesn't have to do good, it just feels good!

Jules Verne, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea

Suffering is not as easy as it looks.


Overheard...

In essence, the planet runs on a cycle of water-splitting by photosynthesis to form oxygen and the production of water by respiration.

Paul G. Falkowski in Life's Engines:  How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

Today, not carrying a smartphone indicates eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age.


Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review (February 55, 2016)

It was impossible for any one to open his grief to a neighbor and to concert measures to defend himself, as he would have had to speak either to one whom he did not know, or whom he knew but did not trust.

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

How many fruitless pranks this ruffian hath botch'd up.

Shakespeare -- Twelfth Night