Monk

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

-- Ray Bradbury

Love is a publicity stunt, and making love - after the first curious raptures - is only another petulant way to pass the time waiting for the studio to call.

-- Louise Brooks

“Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.”

-- Neil Gaiman

I don't know if I feel quite that intimately about my books. I am pretty promiscuous, and I usually love the one that I am with. But, yeah, I don't like picking favorites, either.

“Of all those who start out on philosophy - not those who take it up for the sake of getting educated when they are young and then drop it, but those who linger in it for a longer time - most become quite queer, not to say completely vicious; while the ones who seem perfectly decent... become useless.”

-- Plato, “Republic”

Funny, isn’t it? This is not exactly a call of welcome to all those considering making philosophy a big part of their life, but seems more like a variation of “Abandon all hope ye who enter here!” Which can be pretty irresistible. Especially if you are somebody who has largely given up on life.

However, the larger argument in the relevant passage of “Republic” is that the philosopher only seems useless because society does not know how to make use of him. Nevertheless, I think the quote stands well enough by itself. We do not have true all-knowing philosophers who can govern states brilliantly. All we have are seekers and pretenders, or college professors.

I went to the library yesterday and picked up “Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche” (2011) by James Miller. If you ask me nicely, I may share a few quotes with you. And, no, I am not taking another swing at philosophy. I lost all such ambitions along with my twenties and thirties. It is all just literature to me now, something to enjoy reading while passing the life away.

"When I'm alone, I stop believing I exist."

-- Anonymous

“In the end, we’ll all become stories.”

-- Margaret Atwood, “The Entities” from Moral Disorder

“To a heart in pain
O the song of the rain!”

-- Paul Verlaine, "It Weeps in My Heart"

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

-- Margaret Atwood

“In the end these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go?”

-- Siddharta Gautama

“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”

-- Andrew Carnegie