He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see.
The sharply precise divisions and boundaries, together with the fact that – wind and your more exotic-type spins aside – balls can be made to travel in straight lines only, make textbook tennis plane geometry. It is billiards with balls that won’t hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes what football is to infantry and attrition.
The German logician Kant was right in this respect, human beings are all pretty much identical in terms of our hardwiring. Although we are seldom conscious of it, we are all basically just instruments or expressions of our evolkutiuonary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are.
A city that pretends to be nothing but what it is, an enormous machine of exchange – of spectacle for money, of sensation for money, of money for more money, of pleasure for whatever be tomorrow’s abstract cost.
The doctor gazed at her with a patience she was meant to see.
What if I told you she could because she’s had this happen and she totally knows it’s possible to be just a thing but just like Victor Frankl that every minute from then on minute by minute if you want you can choose to be more if you want, you can choose to be a human being and have it mean something? Then what would you say?
It occurred to me that the movement of the amputated knob perfectly schematized what it would look like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This was how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation.
Chutes and Ladders was perhaps the most sadistic board game ever invented. Adults loathed the game; children loved it. The universe thus dictated that an adult invariably got snookered into playing the game with a child.
Would that we scrutinized our technology the way we do our people.
You’re wearing that bow tie, after all. Isn’t that rather an invitation to a young sir?
You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they’re somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.
The mother at thirty with face commencing to display the faint seams of the plan for the second face life had in store for her and which she feared would be her own mother’s.
Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.
Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.’ ‘Everybody’s a critic. This wasn’t an aesthetic endeavor.
Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.
Sometimes what’s important is dull.
His parents’ pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war.
Sometimes what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works of art for your entertainment, X.
The library, and step on it!
Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting.