Steven Felicelli > Steven's Quotes

“There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at.”
― Theodor Adorno

“Understanding requires a release from understanding.”
― Ronald Sukenick

“This thing called universal gravitation
Is the power of loneliness pulling together.”
― Shuntaro Tanikawa

“You were looking for the key for years, but the door was always open.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“Drowning is not so pitiful as the attempt to rise.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Most people lie and let life play upon them like the tepid discharges of a douche-bag.”
― Lawrence Durell

“We cannot tell what the weather will be tomorrow (or the next hour) because we do not know accurately enough what the weather is right now.”
― Tzvi Gal-Chen

“By engaging with an object in a haptic way, I come to the surface of myself.”
― Laura Marks

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Why do I covet metafiction so much? Why do I nurture a style that David Foster Wallace purportedly exploded in the late 1980s, that is derided by most literary theorists as passé, that people tend to agree serves no worldly, moral purpose other than to draw attention to the writer’s own navel? Because, dammit, metafiction is relevant to today.”
― M.J. Nicholls

“It was never reveille in this windy world.”
― Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

“One wants the struggle. One shouldn't permit it to be removed.”
― Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide

“never figured out what sort of animal I was”
― Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father

“If it could, capitalism would make due with white rats.”
― Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

“This is slow work. . . .Is it not time for my pain-killer?”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“[JMW] Turner could make very little of the human figure once it got too close.”
― Cal Bedient, Days of Unwilling

“Slaves to our media delivery devices, we are ever available to this vague, demanding elsewhere, and our ability to experience the "now" is dissolving.”
― Dodie Bellamy, When the Sick Rule the World

“Language is the square hole we keep trying to jam the round peg of life into. It's the most insane thing we do.”
― Robert Coover, Gerald's Party

“I believe man . . . in the same predicament with other animals.”
― Charles Darwin

“I suppose this feeling of uniqueness is part of the pattern.”
― Jane DeLynn, In Thrall

“And through a Riddle, at the last--
Sagacity, must go--”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“I am X in an indeterminate equation.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“The man who satisfies a ceaseless intellectual curiousity probably squeezes more out of life in the long run than anyone else.”
― Edmund Gosse

“Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don’t get horny enough to actually to father them.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I claim that the fact that we are strongly encouraged to identify with characters for whom death is not a significant creative possibly has real costs. We the audience, and individual you over there and me right here, lose any sense of eschatology, thus of teleology, and live in a moment that is, paradoxically, both emptied of intrinsic meaning or end and quite literally ETERNAL. If we're the only animals who know in advance we're going to die, we're also probably the only animals who would submit so cheerfully to the sustained denial of this undeniable and very important truth. The danger is that, as entertainment's denials of the truth get even more effective and pervasive and seductive, we will eventually forget what they're denials OF. This is scary. Because it seems transparent to me that, if we forget how to die, we're going to forget how to live.”
― David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not: Essays

“Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness