#ode

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#intellectual-sophistication #internet #irony #nerd #nerdery

Modesty is only arrogance by stealth. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#modesty #arrogance

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes ↗

— Bertolt Brecht

#heroism #patriotism #role-models #heroism

Now. Now, Annwyl. No need to curtsy. A simple nod of your head and absolute worship will be more than enough. ↗

— G.A. Aiken

#worship

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to. ↗

— David Mitchell

#cloud-atlas #disgust #hate #history #postmodern

This assumption of the intrinsically repressive nature of collective experience and redemptive power of individuation is a staple of contemporary art theory and criticism. I would argue that a closer analysis of collaborative and collective art practices can reveal a more complex model of social change and identity, one in which the binary oppositions of divided vs. coherent subjectivity, desiring singularity vs. totalizing collective, liberating distanciation vs. stultifying interdependence, are challenged and complicated. ↗

— Grant H. Kester

#collaborative #contemporary #modernism #practice #subjectivity

In these modern times, the only sensible thing to be is nonsensical. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#modern-times #nonsensical #funny

And then I recalled those mysterious stories about the waxworkers of the middle ages and the public reprobation attached to their trade. Did they not live in cellars, in the eternal twilight propitious for enchantments and apparitions? Their visionary art (who, more than they, evoked a truer image of life?) was closely related to that of magicians: bewitchments were carried out with wax figures, witch trials are full of them, and one particular legend haunted me above all, that of the modeler from Anspach, who slowly squeezed the soul and the life out of his model in order to animate his painted waxwork and then, having finished his work of art, awaited nightfall to go and bury the corpse in the ditch at the city walls. ↗

— Jean Lorrain

#murder #waxworks #age

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#literature #postmodernism #humor

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it … Above all, she was pure. She bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. ↗

— Virginia Woolfe

#martyr-syndrome #art