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Yoshitomo Nara, Fuckin' Politics

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While you watch, something to consider: As a society, we have ceased thinking about how cultural matter appears before us — we take it for granted that we will be informed, entertained, perhaps even enchanted, with nothing required of us in kind. We call this cultural matter by the slur under which Silicon Valley has commodified it: “content” — filler material, insentient to the human endeavor behind it, the myriad invisible labors and sacrifices, collaborations and lonelinesses that make anything of beauty and substance come to life.

Maria Popova as The Marginalian

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People need a place they can go back to. There's still time to make it, I think.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

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That's right. I have to get the other half of my shadow back.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

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But there's one thing I want you to remember, Kafka. Those are exactly the kind of people who murdered Miss Saeki's childhood sweetheart. Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it's important to know what's right and what's wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. They're a lost cause, and I don't want anyone like that coming in here.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

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a rendition, not a translation.

Ursula K. Le Guin about her commentary on Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching

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In the post-colonial, electronically connected cosmopolis in which all serious modern artists have taken out premature citizenships, certain organic connections between culture and "thinking" (and art is certainly now, mainly, a form of thinking) may have been broken, so that Nietzsche's diagnosis no longer applies.

Susan Sontag in her essay The Aesthetics of Silence [1969]

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We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. Jack Gilbert, A Brief for the Defence

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Sufjan Stevens: We're all gonna die

Me: *grooving to piano*

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journal

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Hey.... where are you from?

I am from an island.

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I will constitute the field.

Louise Glück, Witchgrass

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The context is not exterior to the question. In this sense, the questions that characterize moral inquiry are formulated or styled by the historical conditions that prompt them.

Judith Butler, How to Give an Account of Oneself

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It is only when there is the fragmentation of thought that there is travail.

J. Krishnamurti, The Network of Thought

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"It is not quite the memory of pain I am pointing to, though the memory is always near. It is as though the experience of pain produced another body that trails after mine, close at hand but spectral. Those urgent, intolerable sensations have subsided, yet my body is undeniably changed by the pain it suffered. I live, as a physical and emotional being, very differently in its aftermath."

Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You

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“By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko's death was this: no truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.” Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

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“So again, seeing all this, you need a new mind, a mind that is free of time, a mind which no longer thinks in terms of distance or space, a mind that has no anchorage or haven. You need such a mind to deal not only with the everlasting but also with the immediate problems of existence.”

J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works (Vol. 12), 1961