The construction itself is an art, its application to the world an evil parasite.
Reading (. . . ) is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.
For new media reactionaries. . . the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the Internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyper-linked, multi-networked world.
We possess books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.
Just in time for the renewal of the war debate in Congress, the University of Chicago Press has released The U. S. Army Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. . . . It's a nifty volume, not only because it gives you a sense of what our most highly regarded military theorists are thinking but because sometimes what they're thinking is the last thing you'd expect. Especially interesting is a section called 'Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations,' which tells us: 'Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction' and 'Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is. '
I hate when counselors and teachers blame everything on low self-esteem in teens. Some of us actually have self-esteem, believe it or not. And when we make mistakes, it's not because of a defect in our psyche. We screw up just because.
I saw a lot when I was young. The first time I got arrested I was twelve years old.
No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris. Beginning with the market - where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber - the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism , everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.
I don't feel like it's pressure. It's more of an obligation - not to entertain or be funny, but to have a certain levity. I mean, there's got to be a lightness in your leg. You have to be as light as you can be, and you don't have to be weighted down, stuck in your emotions and stuck in your body, stuck in your head. You just want to try and elevate something.