Christopher Daniel > Christopher's Quotes

“By and large, our works of social criticism are by journalists and they're written to an industry standard. They're mostly a matter of partisan bickering written in a style that can't fail to be understood by reading clubs that meet at the Starbucks cafe in the local Barnes and Noble. Editors, agents, critics, and readers all agree: a book is a failure if it is not understood. Which ends up meaning that it fails if it tries to provide an understanding beyond what is already well understood. Thus, books have become the enemy of understanding.”
― Curtis White

“This is the conclusion I reached when I was young, poor, and lacking in prospects. While some people [...] read to know they are not alone, the poor read to know that they are not condemned. It is often said that children are the wealth of the poor. This was not my experience. But books are without question the wealth of the poor's children. Books are a guiding light out of the underworld, a secret passageway, an escape hatch. To the affluent, books are ornaments. To the poor, books are siege weapons.”
― Joe Queenan

“Penetrating the literary inferno, you will come to learn its artifices and its arsenic; shielded from the immediate, that caricature of yourself, you will no longer have any but formal experiences, indirect experiences; you will vanish into the Word. Books will be the sole object of your discussions. As for literary people, you will derive no benefit from them. But you will find this out too late, after having wasted your best years in a milieu without density or substance. The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty - the sideshow of second-thoughts - is his rule; he offers himself. Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness. Only sterility is truly distinguished - the man who effaces himself along with his secret, because he disdains to parade it: sentiments expressed are an agony for irony, a slap at humor.

To keep one's secret is the most fruitful of activities. It torments, erodes, threatens you. Even when confession is addressed to God, it is an outrage against ourselves, against the mainspring of our being. The apprehensions, shames, fears from which both religious and profane therapeutics would deliver us constitute a patrimony we should not allow ourselves to be dispossessed of, at any cost. We must defend ourselves against our healers and, even if we die for it, preserve our sickness and our sins. The confessional? a rape of conscience perpetrated in the name of heaven. And that other rape, psychological analysis! Secularized, prostituted, the confessional will soon be installed on our street corners: except for a couple of criminals, everyone aspires to have a public soul, a poster soul.”
― E.M. Cioran

“He remembers his fathers last words: “Stay out of churches, son. All they got a key to is the shit house. And swear to me you’ll never wear a lawman’s badge.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

“I have read all the books, and I am still unhappy.”
― Stephan Mallarmé

“I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda… I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Never mistake education for intellect.”
― Albert Einstein

“Cultural production, criticism, and programming are now governed, in their totality, by indoctrinated middlebrow assholes, educated beyond their intelligence, who assume that anyone from a red state won’t understand it or wouldn’t be interested.

I would struggle to argue to the alt-right YouTuber that Ben Lerner didn’t hate him. But I would argue against his position that the art world isn’t for us, us being the red state rabble. The working class, the uneducated, the failures, and the washed out. We are creators too. And we are allowed to circumvent the tastefulness of the establishment, the cultural gatekeepers, and the university powerhouse. The art world hates us, yes. But art doesn’t.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Baffler

“Man was not born to a world of justice. But he can create such a world!”
― Michael Moorcock, Stormbringer

“If such a gift I truly have been given
And yet, divided, torn, still burn and stray
He is to blame who fashioned me for fire.”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti