John

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Book cover for Home Before Dark
Until the 1960s he never made enough money to afford much elegance of his own. But at some level my father was always the homeless boy, the outsider, the one who stood at the edge of “respectable” life looking critically but wistfully in at ...more
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Saul Bellow
“Someone had said, and Wilhelm agreed with the saying, that in Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.”
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day

Victor Sebestyen
“It's begun,' Lenin replied. 'I'm dizzy. From being on the run to supreme power--that's too much---and according to Trotsky made the sign of the Cross.”
Victor Sebestyen, Lenin the Dictator

Reinhold Niebuhr
“I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really appreciate the meaning of the cross.”
Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic

Legs McNeil
“Mass movements are always so unhip. That’s what was great about punk. It was an antimovement, because there was knowledge there from the very beginning that with mass appeal comes all those tedious folks who need to be told what to think. Hip can never be a mass movement. And culturally, the gay liberation movement and all the rest of the movements were the beginning of political correctness, which was just fascism to us. Real fascism. More rules.”
Legs McNeil, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

Isaac Bashevis Singer
“At moments when Herman fantasized about a new metaphysics, or even a new religion, he based everything on the attraction of the sexes. In the beginning was lust. The godly, as well as the human, principle is desire. Gravity, light, magnetism, thought may be aspects of the same universal longing. Suffering, emptiness, darkness are nothing more than interruptions of a cosmic orgasm that grows forever in intensity...”
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies: A Love Story

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