it is dochs oars, sûnt 2001

Quote of the Day | 0908

Our technics has become compulsive and tyrannical, since it is not treated as a subordinate instrument of life; while, at the same time, our art has become either increasingly empty of content or downright irrational, in an effort to claim ...

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Quote of the Day | 0909

Probably the fundamental thesis is this: "the innocent eye sees nothing". We see what, in one way or another, we are disposed to see. What disposes us may be in some degree biological, but it is primarily cultural; what we ...

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Quote of the Day | 0909

When I write criticism I’m in such a protected position: here are my arguments, here are my blessed opinions, here is my textual evidence, here my rhetorical flourish. One feels very pleased. Fiction has none of these defences. You are ...

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Quote of the Day | 0909

[...] playbooks for decoding the 2008 presidential campaign. We may expect the following. Language will be carefully crafted. Advertisements will focus on personal narratives. The campaign will employ “attack” advertisements that emotionally sway voters [...]. ...

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Quote of the Day | 0910

thanks to the hurricane and the hours of darkness it imposed on me, I and many others had a kind of high school reunion with boredom. It brought about a sudden and unmistakable realization that we are only puppets jerked ...

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Quote of the Day | 0911

We are living in the most exciting intellectual time in history. In my lifetime we have discovered such profundities, such huge principles. When I was an undergraduate, I went to the professor of geology and said, "Would you talk to ...

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Quote of the Day | 0912

ever since the web went mainstream in 1993 there has been a constant stream of what computer scientist John Seely Brown calls "endism" – assertions that some new technology presages the termination of some revered practice, not to mention the ...

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Quote of the Day | 0914

When you think about how we're coming to depend on software for all sorts of intellectual chores, for finding information, for socialising - you need to start worrying that it's not giving us, as individuals, enough room to act for ...

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Quote of the Day | 0914

the question is whether most Think Tanks may actually be preventing people thinking of new visions of how society could be organised - and made fairer and freer. That in reality they have become the armoured shell that surrounds all ...

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Quote of the Day | 0915

I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the ...

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Quote of the Day | 0916

while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are ...

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Quote of the Day | 0917

We are old nobodies who love what we do. We would be old nobodies even if Oprah and the New York Times best-seller list consecrated us, because we don't want to create illusions around ourselves like so many others have ...

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Quote of the Day | 0917

In the analogue era, writing was read much later than it was written. Digital writing is meant for rapid release and response. A text or tweet is a slightly interrupted, virtual way of having a conversation. An online article starts ...

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Quote of the Day | 0919

Books, like newspapers, are an essentially middle-class phenomenon whose market is the self-improving professional. As a bourgeois medium, books and their authors depend on the cash nexus. Johnson went straight to the point with: "No man but a blockhead ever ...

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Quote of the Day | 0920

I own a lot of books—many that are not wonderful but that I have real affection for, the way one does a hometown. With books, as with cities, good and bad can sometimes seem beside the point. I can either ...

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Quote of the Day | 0922

Very few of us write well straight out of the gate. Precocity is more common among poets, perhaps for the simple reason that poems are shorter than stories and novels. Most poetry is built on the flash, the glimpse, the ...

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Quote of the Day | 0922

If the fertility of our culture is what we're concerned about, then McLuhanesque musing on the intrinsic nature of reading (as if it had any such thing) is beside the point. Reading per se is not the issue. The point ...

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Quote of the Day | 0922

Writers are very prone to having unreasonable expectations of reality and its inhabitants – used, as we are, to manipulating fictitious characters and environments, we can tend to assume that nothing in the real world should move on without at ...

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Quote of the Day | 0923

in this era, writing has so little effect compared to when the novel was at the center of the culture. That kind of impact is totally impossible and you know it, so you have to believe in books as a ...

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Quote of the Day | 0924

We look for evidence to reinforce our models Some folks are all too able to provide that evidence or to create other barriers to understanding Early mental models are extremely persistent Poor teaching does more harm than good Jonathan Drori, "Why we don’t understand as ...

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Quote of the Day | 0924

The problem is a notion that a language doesn’t really exist unless it is thriving on the page. But that is, frankly, an illusion due to the invention of print just several centuries ago. There are about 6000 languages ...

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Quote of the Day | 0925

it’s just unimaginable to me that writing itself would die out. OK, so where is it going to go? It’s a fluid force: it’ll come up through cracks, it’ll go around corners, it’ll pour down from the ceiling. And I ...

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Quote of the Day | 0925

It turned out that when people felt comfortable - when they were put in a relaxed and pleasant environment - they were more willing to take irrational risks, to place losing bets on games of chance. Jonah Lehrer, 'Why being relaxed ...

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Quote of the Day | 0926

I was not aware that it is a heresy to hold that Freedom is not a masterpiece. There is something churlish about my friend’s insistence upon critical unanimity. Franzen’s book, after all, is fantastically popular. It is commercially immune from ...

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Quote of the Day | 0927

Listen, you living writers out there. Write us a masterpiece or two, for chrissake. We need something more solid than Urban Intellectual Fodder. What's with you -- do you want us to die from starvation? Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash, 'Are ...

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Quote of the Day | 0928

But if philosophy is to serve a positive purpose, it must not teach mere skepticism, for, while the dogmatist is harmful, the skeptic is useless. Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, ...

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Quote of the Day | 0930

the idea that content is king has great intuitive appeal. I consume media content based on what I enjoy or find useful—surely the best company is the one with the best content! Reinforcing this simple observation is the intense emotional ...

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Quote of the Day | 1001

We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ...

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Quote of the Day | 1003

Little else can demonstrate as clearly as a shelf of books (or possibly a refrigerator) who we are or imagine ourselves to be. William Germano, 'What are books good for?'

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Quote of the Day | 1004

I click on a few Google articles about Naipaul. Golly gee. He appears to be have been accused of dimensions of vitriol such as I have never heard before. He has been charged with everything from wife-beating, a predilection for ...

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Quote of the Day | 1007

Look at how subtly daring V.S. Naipaul has been, for instance! He has created hybrid forms of autobiography and history and fiction (In a Free State, The Enigma of Arrival), has tried to blur the division between journalism and novel-writing. ...

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Quote of the Day | 1007

when I arrived in Europe with a scholarship after finishing university, I realized that if I continued to think that way, I would never become a writer, that the only way would be to decide officially that literature would be ...

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Quote of the Day | 1008

In the quote from his journals, Emerson mentions expression and growth in the same breath. Self-expression through writing was an almost organic need of his, as if his genius received its daily bread from his pen. For over fifty years ...

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Quote of the Day | 1009

I find the average episode of This American Life to be 99 per cent more reliable than the average new American work of literary fiction. The juxtaposition of personal narrative with the facts of the world and the facts of ...

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Quote of the Day | 1010

Fiction has developed in unexpected ways since Elizabeth Bowen commanded, in her “Notes on Writing a Novel,” that the “functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the novelist’s mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be ...

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Quote of the Day | 1010

Academic writing has been remarkably resistant to technological change. It survived the typewriter crisis with nary a blip; the word processor, despite its immense advantages, left little or no mark on academic prose, except that really good quotations tended to ...

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Quote of the Day | 1010

When you had to carve things in stone, you got the Ten Commandments. When things had to be written with a goose quill and you had to boil blood or whatever to make ink, you got Shakespeare. When you went ...

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Quote of the Day | 1011

The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself. Length may also, ...

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Quote of the Day | 1015

Benjamin's writings are the "Colour Theory" of the twentieth century. If we could agree (and science would almost certainly back us up here) to take his theories on German philology, architectural sociology, media theory and history of philosophy with a ...

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Quote of the Day | 1017

At bottom, we are pattern recognizers who seek escape from ambiguity and indecision. If a major brain function is to maintain mental homeostasis, it is understandable how stances of certainty can counteract anxiety and apprehension. Even though I know ...

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Quote of the Day | 1017

he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem. John Ioannidis, as paraphrased in ...

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Quote of the Day | 1018

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise ...

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Quote of the Day | 1019

I have only ever met one person – a distinguished arts journalist – who has read all Updike's 60-plus books; most of us, even long-term fans, probably score between 30 and 40. Julian Barnes, on Updike's Rabbit Books Boeklog on Updike

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Quote of the Day | 1019

I am a firm believer in the Humean position that reason is the slave of the passions. We started out with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is also where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. Rather than ...

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Quote of the Day | 1020

The European: The challenge is not to gather information, but to make sense of the information we have? George Dyson: Right. We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where ...

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Quote of the Day | 1021

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it’s been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you’re letting the novel make its own shape, and ...

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Quote of the Day | 1023

Architecture school invests several years conditioning the student to respond preferentially to abstract industrial forms and surfaces. At the same time, this industrial aesthetic is touted as superior to all previous, traditional expressions of built geometry. Elaborate theories of history ...

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Quote of the Day | 1025

During the war Hergé mastered storytelling and drawing, created the undying characters Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus, and worked through the tale of his own bastard descent. He did all this in a collaborationist newspaper. Simon Kuper, 'Tintin and the war' Boeklog ...

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Quote of the Day | 1026

To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus ...

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Quote of the Day | 1026

I’m finished with the Bible. Back to drawing pornography. Robert Crumb, Paris Review Interview 'The Art of Comics' Boeklog on Crumb

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Quote of the Day | 1026

What this crisis has really been about is not cash flow or credit. It’s nothing to do with liquidity — what it’s really been all about is words. It’s the drying-up of mouths, the logorrhoea jam, the stammer and mutter ...

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Quote of the Day | 1028

A novel which poses questions is more interesting than one which provides answers. Another way of putting it is that a book should be a dialogue between reader and writer, rather than a monologue. It is unlikely, of course, to ...

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Quote of the Day | 1029

Art historians have never really explained the appearance of shadows in European art. No art made outside of Europe used shadows. Chinese, Japanese, Persian and Indian - all highly sophisticated image-makers - ignored shadows. Yet they occur in a big ...

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Quote of the Day | 1030

when Donald Trump lies, when Vladimir Putin lies, when corporations and power lie about climate change, about refugees, about our world, it is not simply that they are lying about a particular issue. It is that they are saying the ...

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Quote of the Day | 1031

When you think about it, that’s pretty much what our education amounts to. We take everything we are told for granted – it must all be true, because someone a little older than we are says so. John Lloyd, 'Ignorance? You'd ...

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Quote of the Day | 1102

The experience of reading so closely mimics the process of consciousness that it attains a unique level of artistic intimacy. Great art permeates the barrier of consciousness; reading obliterates it. It literally happens inside you. How’s that for intimate? So if ...

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Quote of the Day | 1102

Most people do not realize just how deeply their expectations run, nor how profoundly they believe that they are universal. It is existentially shattering to find that this is not the case. These divisions about what we want our government ...

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Quote of the Day | 1104

"Books have had a kind of spooky power, embedded as they are in the very structures of learning, commerce, and culture by which we have absorbed, stored, and transmitted information, opinion, art, and wisdom," wrote the acclaimed editor Elisabeth Sifton ...

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Quote of the Day | 1104

I came across a copy of 'Howards End' and had a look into it. Not good enough. E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not ...

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Quote of the Day | 1105

Retreat from the smoothness of technology is not an available option, even if it were desirable. The disbanding of the papers has already occurred, a splendid fluttering of the world’s texts to the winds. We will have to gather them ...

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Quote of the Day | 1105

Every writer has his own voice. (Every serious or dedicated writer.) This is achieved by the way he punctuates; the rhythm of his phrases; the way the writing reflects the processes of the writer’s thought: all the nervousness, all the ...

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Quote of the Day | 1106

I was imagining the corned-beef contest to be somehow more graceful and balletic. But as Shea counts down to zero and the eating begins, what I see instead are twelve people grotesquely cramming huge piles of meat and fat-sodden rye ...

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Quote of the Day | 1106

You can get more of everything online except human attention. If you’re lucky enough to work in a business that aims to attract people’s attention for positive reasons -- and good enough at what you do to succeed at it ...

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Quote of the Day | 1107

— the concept of the informavores, the human being as somebody eating information. So you can, in a way, see that the Internet and that the information overload we are faced with at this very moment has a lot to ...

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Quote of the Day | 1107

Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire ...

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Quote of the Day | 1108

Reviews, even when they are fine writing in their own right, even when they are wholly, brilliantly true in a deep way, sometimes make the reviewer look shabby and denuded, his pants at his ankles, his naked knees aquiver. They ...

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Quote of the Day | 1108

Carr’s model for what we might call the ‘book-user’—the contemplative literate subject—is grounded particularly in visions from American Transcendentalism and Romantic poetry. It is Nathaniel Hawthorne sitting meditatively in Concord, Massachusetts, prior to having his concentration broken by the intruding ...

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Quote of the Day | 1108

The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions — and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem — are simply not absorbed. The ...

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Quote of the Day | 1110

It is difficult to impose ideas onto people on the level of argument; people will resist, often outright and without consideration. The natural, critical, conscious mind serves essentially as a spam box, trapping and discarding the vast multitude of input ...

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Quote of the Day | 1110

There are only seven plots in all of fiction — in all of human life, really — and chances are you’re living one of them. Heather Mallick, 'Life has only seven basic stories'

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Quote of the Day | 1111

It was an intuition or maybe even something cognitive after years of writing and editing: If there’s a problem in the sentence, you fix it by going to the verb. Whenever I hit a muddy passage that’s how I straighten ...

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Quote of the Day | 1112

Blogs may be more like private journals with megaphones than reasoned contributions to public life. ... Ortega y Gasset's fear almost a century ago of the 'revolt of the masses' needs an update. We face a revolt of the writers. ...

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Quote of the Day | 1112

Even if you take out the participation bit, plenty of people are speculating that now the book is a screen-based phenomenon, it will become a multimedia event, breaking off into bits of film and augmented reality. That the very word ...

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Quote of the Day | 1112

Winners are stupid … because usually they win by chance. Umberto Eco, 'Real literature is about losers'

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Quote of the Day | 1113

If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, you could say that pretentiousness is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius. Sam Leith, 'Pretentious, impenetrable, hard work ... better? Why we need difficult books'

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Quote of the Day | 1113

We all seek a sense of what it would be like to be fully connected to something. We all have a sense of what really living, and not just existing, would be. We know that there’s a level of life ...

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Quote of the Day | 1114

If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and engagingly said in one, then it's amateur work. Robert Louis Stevenson, as quoted by Robert McCrum

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Quote of the Day | 1114

Long since retired, he was now restricted to a wheelchair and, with time on his hands, had been re-reading old favorites, all the great novels that had inspired a lifetime’s career in reading, writing, teaching. We talked about Faulkner, Fitzgerald, ...

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Quote of the Day | 1114

Car manufacturers are worried that younger people in particular don't aspire to own cars like we used to in the 70s, 80s, or even the 90s. Designers commonly say that teenagers today aspire to own the latest smartphone more than ...

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Quote of the Day | 1114

To be painfully candid, I consider a great part of what is offered to students as intellectual discourse, at least in the humanities and social sciences, to be a sort of higher twaddle. This so-called learning, most recently “theory,” seems ...

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Quote of the Day | 1115

When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. Martin Amis, 'Laureate of Terror'

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Quote of the Day | 1115

Rumpus: Is there a book that most embodies your dad for you? [Nanette] Vonnegut: All of his work makes me hyperventilate, but Slaughterhouse-Five more than any others. Rumpus: Why? Vonnegut: Because it’s so good. Because of the pace of it, because of the ...

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Quote of the Day | 1116

For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is ...

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Quote of the Day | 1116

Of course history is easily manipulated – though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened. We need a knowledge of history to spot the delusions of leaders making false parallels, such as President Bush ...

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Quote of the Day | 1118

I was a normal sort of boy who liked to run around and play games and go to the movies. But I did manage to read enough so that I wanted to do it myself. I wanted to be on ...

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Quote of the Day | 1118

We would replace PR-speak and certain Orwellian words and expressions with more neutral, precise language. If someone we interview misused language, we would paraphrase instead of using direct quotations. (Examples, among many others: The activity that takes place in casinos ...

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Quote of the Day | 1119

There are too many critics writing too many pieces. And even the ones who have reacted against the shallowness of the current conversation, the ones who turn out long, detailed considerations of films have found a way to make themselves ...

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Quote of the Day | 1121

"Stupidity is an aspect of life, especially an aspect of modern life," he says. "The way we have the world set up, it's very easy for the average person to just get through. All you have to do is figure ...

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Quote of the Day | 1122

A man and a woman who have never met before find themselves sharing a sleeping car on an overnight train. After some initial embarrassment, they both go to sleep in their bunks... But in the middle of the night, the ...

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Quote of the Day | 1123

Still, when it comes to the state of the novel, to the future of the novel, I feel rather optimistic. Numbers don't count where books are concerned, for there is only one reader, each and every time only one reader. ...

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Quote of the Day | 1124

Wallace Stevens’s poetry is more beautiful, and Robert Frost’s often more powerful, than Eliot’s, but the latter’s, once read, refuses to leave the mind. How much does memorability matter in literature? A vast deal, I suspect, and in poetry above ...

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Quote of the Day | 1125

Narratives, and the selves we construct through them, convey our individual perspectives of "self-in-world". These perspectives include individuals' understanding of how cause and effect works, and so require a temporal ordering of salient events that can be communicated to others. ...

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Quote of the Day | 1126

Given that new media typically allow new creators to create new forms of material that is pleasing to new audiences, it's hard to justify giving the current lotto winners a veto over the next generation of disruptive technologies. Especially when ...

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Quote of the Day | 1130

Munro reveals an endearing idiosyncrasy: “I don’t always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction.” She goes on to explain that she doesn’t read in order to find out what ...

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Quote of the Day | 1201

finding and keeping an audience online is almost impossible, and the early stages of that journey are thankless and terrible. You have to publish a lot, even though absolutely no one will read your stuff for a long time. And ...

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Quote of the Day | 1202

Bleak is chic  

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Quote of the Day | 1202

Without analysis and criticism, we can't get to grips with what may or may not be wrong around us – without a muscular capacity to imagine, we can't construct better alternatives – without support, we can find it difficult to ...

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Quote of the Day | 1203

I have been invited to so many conferences on “The Death of the Book” that I suspect it is very much alive.Robert Darnton, 'The Library: Three Jeremiads'

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Quote of the Day | 1204

Would feral be an interesting way for thinking about how technology had unintended consequences? It occurred to me that of all the things that were most likely to go feral in the technological landscape it was data. It gets created ...

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Quote of the Day | 1204

The meaning of consistent striving, modest self-image, and quiet solidarity in politics is mostly lost today, partly because the last great mass movements for change in the West—the Civil Rights, anti-war, and feminist movements—occurred decades ago, in the 1960s and ...

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