The bug will eat you when the bug eats.

A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at the most a comma is a poor period that it lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath.

– Gertrude Stein, qtd. here.

(swissmiss)

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

To rely on the usefulness of fear is to affirm the efficacy of tyranny.

A good single sentence saying can’t require background evidencing or further explanation. It must be instantly recognizable as true. It also needs to be news to the listener. Most single sentences that people can immediately verify as true they already believe. What’s left? One big answer is things that people don’t believe or think about much for lack of wanting to, despite evidence. Drawing attention to these is called cynicism.

(via marginal revolution)

When I was growing up, in Ann Arbor, Mich., there was a little debate: Should school officials try to prevent black students from using the N-word? I don’t believe the issue was ever settled. And this brings up the question of whether “teabagger” could be kind of a conservative N-word: to be used in the family, but radioactive outside the family.

My new motto.

from Generated Organs gone as soon as come, Permanent in The Imagination, Consider’d as Nothing by the Natural Man.

(William Blake. From the text accompanying his engraving of the Laocoön. Circa 1826-1827.)

My saying is, “If you don’t like the weather in Texas, you’re a lot smarter than I thought you were.”