“Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.”

-- Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Dreams can be like that, too.

“When a Bing Crosby movie ever came to Steubenville, I would stay there all day and watch. And that’s where I learned to sing, ‘cause it’s true I don’t read a note,” he would say. “I learned from Crosby, and so did Sinatra, and Perry Como. We all started imitating him. He was the teacher for all of us.”

-- Dean Martin

[Source: Nick Tosches ( Read more... )

while the rain fell all around us
I listened to you breathing
I wanted to remember
the sound of your breath
but we lay there forgetting

-- W. S. Merwin, "The Sound of Forgetting"

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“Before we came here, we thought of ourselves as good people.”-- Vince Foster ( Read more... )

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The show "The Americans" apparently isn't doing well at the Emmy Awards tonight.

Me waiting for The Americans to win something pic.twitter.com/T0Uuv9lWy5
- Tiana (@jaimelannisters) September 19, 2016

Although Thomas Mann is a 20th-century writer, he does write as if he is living under the moral restrictiveness of the Charles Dickens era. It is perhaps my main regret about the man. I wouldn’t have minded if he had a little touch of the Henry Miller philosophy when it comes to sex and literature - a touch ( Read more... )

“All the great arts need to be supplemented by philosophical chatter and daring speculation about the nature of things: from this source appear to come the sublimity of thought and all-around completeness which characterize them.”

-- Plato, “Phaedrus” (Tr. Walter Hamilton)

A Romanian once said to me that Americans are always telling stories. I'm not sure this is as true as it once was. Where we once used to spin yarns, now we sit in front of the tv and receive pictures. I'm not sure the younger generation even knows how to gossip.

-- John Updike at The Paris Review (Winter 1968)