#usc

How do you end a story that’s not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation point where a period would have sufficed? What if you kill something breathing and breathe life into something the author wanted to eliminate? How do you get inside the mind of a person who isn’t there? Fill the shoes of someone who will never again fill his own? ↗

— Shaila M. Abdullah

#manuscript #writing #life

Auschwitz?! That is a name I had heard before. There is not much time for thinking. It had been raining here not so long ago. The asphalt of the wet, wide platform reflects the light of the high lighting-poles. The row of armed SS men competes in howling with their dogs they hold on leashes ↗

— Azriel Feuerstein

#azriel-feuerstein #holocaust #the-tumbler #men

But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless — a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. ↗

— Kim Stanley Robinson

#obfuscation #science

Te pasas toda la vida atorado en el laberinto, pensando en cómo vas a escapar de ahí un día y que fabuloso será; imaginar ese futuro te mantiene con vida, pero nunca te escapas. Sólo utilizas el futuro para escapar del presente. ↗

— John Green

#frases #john-green #vida

At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook. ↗

— William Styron

#banality #dachau #evil #hate #holocaust

The more perfect a thing is, the more susceptible to good and bad treatment it is. ↗

— Dante Alighieri

#good #good and bad #more #perfect #susceptible

Vin Diesel is the best kisser in the world, better than anyone else I've ever had. The most attractive thing about Vin is his brain. That's his most attractive muscle. ↗

— Asia Argento

#anyone #attractive #best #better #brain

To be a winner of that, and to fall in the long line of traditional great backs at USC, to have your name in perpetuity, the fact that your parents are like icons... that's the greatest thing. ↗

— Marcus Allen

#fact #fall #great #greatest #greatest thing

Whatever muscles I have are the product of my own hard work and nothing else. ↗

— Evelyn Ashford

#hard #hard work #i #muscles #my own

The fatigue produced on the muscles of the human frame does not altogether depend on the actual force employed in each effort, but partly on the frequency with which it is exerted. ↗

— Charles Babbage

#altogether #depend #does #each #effort