Luke > Recent Status Updates

It's amazing how defensive people are getting about my commenting on the current GR blog entry with my chosen demographic-based reading structure. And by amazing I mean disappointingly expected and pathetically weak.

It always makes me sad to see this.

What is done, is done, / And violence is now turned privilege, / As cream turns cheese, if buried long enough.

Soon we came to the battle-fields and the lines of trenches of both sides. To any one who did not see it as it was then it is impossible to imagine it. It was not terrifying it was strange. We were used to ruined houses and even ruined towns but this was different. It was a landscape. And it belonged to no country.

Thanks Goodreads. More ads everytime I maneuver on this website is exactly what I need. Guess I'll be bringing up search histories from now on.

Do we keep
Our love to pay our debts with?

Sure, [Stein] said, as Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it.

Recognizing the agreed-upon version of reality is only one of billions of brain jobs.

Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one's way in the dark.

They can make me marry, but they can't make me live.

Those who made revolution and those who were devoured by that same revolution, though it wasn't the same but another, not the dream but the nightmare that hides behind the eyelids of the dream.

People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well.

"What am I to do with a white man's heart?...I want his head, his mind.["]

Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering. That depends, said Lalo Cura. Depends on what, champ? On lots of things, said Lalo Cura. Say you're shot in the back of the head, for example, and you don't hear the motherfucker come up behind you, then you're off to the next world, no pain, no suffering. Goddamn kid, said Epifanio. Have you ever been shot in...

There is no objectivity. There is only instinct.

Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments.

He has been neither realistic enough, nor fantastic enough.

Women's History Month is coming up. What's everyone got planned for it?

[A]s much as she would do to protect the new life inside her, their making had nothing to do with how careful she was allowed to be.

Time to see Black History Month 2018 out with a classic.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In that sense a metaphor is like a life jacket. And remember, there are life jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. Best not to forget it.

"What a lovely way you have of putting things."
"Perhaps it is another way of avoiding facts."
"No, perhaps you see more."

A person who didn't pretend to reconcile the irreconcilable, as was the fashion these days.

The nice thing about having waited for so long before starting this is that I also have the next five, recently procured within the last few months. Still missing the errant seventh, but that may turn up as well between the opening of the first and the closing of the sixth.

During Black History Month, it is important to remember that not all independent bookstores, and their books, are created equal. Apolitical choice in literature does not exist under antiblack capitalism: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...

Truth is a queer thing, when it comes to rich men talking about the poor.

If I had a nickel for every person who didn't know that Alexandre Dumas was black, I wouldn't need to work anymore. It's Black History Month, people. Get it together.

(the son of the bitch could be oh so modern, but only when it was to his advantage)

[T]he law says you have the right to hold a n[—], but begging the law's pardon, it lies. Yes, Epps, when the law says that it's a liar, and the truth is not in it. Is every thing right because the law allows it?

Until they have been chained and beaten—until they find themselves in the situation I was, borne away from home and family towards a land of bondage—let them refrain from saying what they would not do for liberty.