trees are harlequins, words are harlequins

raggedjackscarlet:

nostalgebraist:
O, and no child back in the day would have dreamt of using the infantile “dino” abbreviation.
I’m gonna guess…… John C. Wright.

Close, but it was actually a commenter on Vox Day’s blog. Less incomplete quote:

I loved my “was ist was” (what is what) research book as a boy. It is difficult to find the same level of scientific depth today for 5-8 year old children, it’s as if publishers don’t trust the intellect of children anymore, just because the current crop of young adults is dumbed down nowadays.
*books not book

Had many of those as a boy, including about the moon and the Saturn missions, another one about the solar system including tables of radius, mass, distance to sun (both aphel and perihel, plus average), duration of “planet year” (ie time of full circumnavigation), and so on. All metrics given in both absolute measures (eg, millions of km) as well as in relative Earth-multiples. I knew the entire table by heart, just like the dinosaur stuff.

O, and no child back in the day would have dreamt of using the infantile “dino” abbreviation.

Another book about atoms and their elementary particles…

(via raggedjackscarlet)

#quotes meta

22nd Mar 201616 notes

vexingsibilant asked: If you don't mind, what was that cloacal obsession quote from?

It’s a line of dialogue from Ulysses, but I actually came upon it it while reading a collection of Ezra Pound’s letters to Joyce.

The line seems (?) to have been a joking reference to H. G. Wells’ review of Joyce’s Portrait, which claimed that Joyce had a “cloacal obsession.” Pound mentions in a published essay, in a sentence that’s #quotes-worthy in itself:

Mr. Wells says that Joyce has a cloacal obsession, but he also says that Mr. Joyce writes literature and that his book is to be ranked with the works of Sterne and of Swift.

In fairness, Pound has his own weird theories about nether regions. From one of his letters to Joyce, commenting on a drafted chapter of Ulysses:

3a. gallic preference for Phallus – purely personal – know mittel europa humour runs to other orifice. – But don’t think you will strengthen your impact by that particular.

The editor of the collection explains:

As his letters on Ulysses show, Pound came more and more to think that Joyce’s imagination, either by temperament or because of his subject, was essentially analytical and satiric and tended toward the excremental. His own imagination, by contrast, was essentially phallic in its motive of desire. “Phallic” and “excremental” appeared to Pound to be an essential difference between poetry and prose. Poetry asserts positive emotional values and works toward emotional synthesis. Prose arises from an instinct of negation, proceeds by intellectual analysis, and presents something one wants to eliminate.

20th Mar 20168 notes

bobwoco asked: Where do you find the articles that you quote from? I'm pretty sure you've talked about it before, but I can't remember.

I don’t have any special method, I just quote from things I happen to be reading for non-quote-related reasons. I guess I like to read a lot of fringe/crackpot-type stuff, which helps, but the majority of my quotes are from relatively “normal” sources.

18th Mar 20167 notes

Keep reading

20th Feb 201638 notes

jack-v:

nostalgebraist:
Physicists say that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. And quantum physics tells us that you are nothing but energy. So it stands to reason that you too can neither be created nor destroyed.
I like the sentiment but doubt the accuracy. I would prefer to say, I am an arrangement of energy. If you smash an unbroken egg, you don’t end up with NOTHING, but what you have isn’t exactly an “unbroken egg”…

Yes, just so. (This was a #quote from a silly self-help book titled “Quantum Love: Use Your Body’s Atomic Energy to Create the Relationship You Desire")

(via jack-v)

#quotes meta

16th Feb 201645 notes

dimitriarkady:

nostalgebraist:
“I’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning,” says Miss S., kneeling in front of a Kienholzlike tableau of filth and decay.
You asked about writing tics earlier, I don’t care to dig up the post but ‘tableau’ is one of these for you, to the point where I almost wonder if you’re doing it intentionally.

Do I do this outside of The Northern Caves? (In that case it was intentional.)

This post is a quote from someone else (tagged #quotes), so it doesn’t count.

(via dimitriarkady-deactivated201610)

12th Feb 201611 notes

Advanced Female Sexuality: 3 Secrets. {Adult} →

That last #quote was from this abysmal new-age clickbait article which really cannot be described or summarized, only experienced, so here you go

27th Jan 201671 notes

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton asked: Where do your quotes come from?

Anywhere I see stuff I want to quote. So, various web pages and various books. If you want to know where one of them is from, you can usually find them by Googling, although not always.

6th Jan 20164 notes

BTW that last quote was from this creepypasta (not sure if that’s the right term) which initially looked tacky and dumb to me but turned out to be surprisingly effective

#quotes meta

30th Nov 20156 notes

the-grey-tribe:

nostalgebraist:
One of the regrettable things about the current state of the Cuckservative meme is that it seems to have undergone semantic shift.
Would you care to elucidate?

The original post was an out-of-context quote. If you’re curious you can find the blog post it’s from on Google (although I can’t say I recommend reading it).

(via the-grey-tribe)

#quotes meta

18th Nov 201529 notes