Luke > Recent Status Updates

I can't imagine the Half Price I send the majority of my castoffs to attempting to sell discarded library copies such as this, so I wonder what will happen to it. Perhaps it will just be donated ever and anon until it finally falls to pieces. I can think of worse fates.

You say our dances are decadent. But haven't you done some dancing yourself? Invisible dances, infinitely more decadent than ours?...It's the dance of the overlords after they've finished laying out traps for their enemies, after they've pandered to the powers that be, as they near their prize: a job with power and all the perks. It's the night before they kill the fatted calf, when they sit sucking their water...

More passive aggressive fucknuggets in my friend requests. I would've thought that more people on this site would have gotten a life by now, but wonders never cease.

Here it jumped out at me, naked, towering and unashamed, the lie of war! No, it was not the promenaders, the careless, the carefree, who were to blame, but those alone who drove the war on with their words. But we too were guilty if we did not do our part against them.

How intoxicating it can be, self-sacrifice.

...there were orders that can be given but which cannot be carried out...

[I]t struck me as a criminal anachronism to let myself be trained in the use of implements of murder in the twentieth century.

I want to read all the new authors, but I also want to shake up my Most Read Authors stats. Sigh.

On the Major's bedside table there was an open book—a very recondite and literary book. The place was marked with a matchstick. The Major turned over forty pages or so, a reasonable evening's reading, and marked the new place with the match again.

...it was the same one, queen, older than the earth, the painful medusa of light the size of the sky which with every hand measure of its trajectory was returning a million years to its origins...

[T]here is no world where just gender matters.

I sit at my desk dreaming of ways to blow up the building and they think I could rise in the company.

I have two different editions of this (accidentally forgot I owned it already while at a sale), so now i'm tempted to scrounge them both up and compare.

"If you want to read books that focus on black women, you better start writing and keep writing."

It's all right to kill if you're frightened, isn't it, Christine?

Of course the phantom of the opera is a cat person.

Kazuo "Unreliable Narrator" Ishiguro, everyone (I haven't come across another author who does it better).

[O]ur epoch thought that it could only portray the "sentimental" and the "sublime," but not the painful and the true.

Art always reaches its peak where it becomes the life interest of a people.

I parted with many of my books today due to lack of space and the unlikelihood that I'd need them in the future. Still, till we meet again.

Well, it's not enough simply to be pretty, do you hear me, Madeleine? It doesn't excuse you from human obligations. It doesn't permit you to poison a child's mind and cr[*]pple his soul. You should hang for what you have done to him since he was born...you should burn!

Who else is pre-ordering 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'? You know you need to.

Lee wastes so much time declaring that it was not a neuroatypical person who wrote what Virginia Woolf wrote that it's a wonder that she gets anything done.

I think the best these men can do is not to talk about themselves anymore.
Of course, none of this would be printed.

She noted how everyone had a phrase, a way of speaking which made them sound in control.

"Only where the majority, after the decision has been taken, proceeds to liquidate politically, and in extreme cases physically, the opposing minority, does the technical device of majority decision degenerate into majority rule." (Arendt and I would likely disagree on the definition of "liquidate", but this is still the most (and possibly only) useful sentence I've come across in this so far.

To celebrate my newfound freedom, it's time to finally finish this thing omf christ.

Two days until I'm freeeeeeeeeee....

How exactly do you argue that a slave-owning populace, while embarking on a project of genocide, successfully eradicated poverty? I mean, you could always equate slaves and indigenous nations to non-people, but that'd just make you a loathsome pile of shit.