Christopher Hitchens, on death (written about 9 months before his actual death):


Discussing mortality, Hitchens and a friend used to muse that there would come a day when the newspapers would come out and they wouldn’t be there to read them. 'And on that day, I’ve realised recently, I’ll probably be in the newspapers, or quite a lot of them. And etiquette being what it is, generally speaking, rather nice things being said about me.’ He shrugs. 'Just typical that will be the edition I miss. But it’s not so much that; it’s more that you’re at the party and you’re tapped on the shoulder and told you have to leave. The party is still going on, but it’s going on without you. And even people who swear to remember you are not really going to do so.
Source: "Godless in Tumourville", The Independent - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8388695/Godless-in-Tumourville-Christopher-Hitchens-interview.html

When the magazine was finally organized, and when George Plimpton was selected as its editor instead of Humes, Humes was disappointed. He refused to leave the cafés to sell advertising or negotiate with French printers. And in the summer of 1952 he did not hestitate to leave Paris with William Styron, accepting an invitation from a French actress, Madame Nénot, to go down to Cap Myrt, near Saint-Tropez, and visit her fifty-room villa that had been designed by her father, a leading architect. The villa had been occupied by the Germans early in the war. And so when Styron and Humes arrived they found holes in its walls, through which they could look out to the sea, and the grass was so high and the trees so thick with grapes that Humes’s little Volkswagen became tangled in the grass.

So they went on foot toward the villa, but suddenly stopped when they saw, rushing past them, a young, half-naked girl, very brown from the sun, wearing only handkerchiefs tied bikini-style, her mouth spilling with grapes. Screaming behind her was a lecherous-looking old French farmer whose grape arbor she obviously had raided.

“Styron,” Humes cried, gleefully, “we have arrived!”

“Yes,” he said, “we are here!”

More nymphets came out of the trees in bikinis later, carrying grapes and also half cantaloupes the size of cart-wheels, and they offered some to Styron and Humes. The next day they all went swimming and fishing and, in the evening, they sat in the bombed-out villa, a breathtaking site of beauty and destruction, drinking wine with the young girls, who seemed to belong only to the beach. It was an electric summer, with the nymphets batting around like moths against the screen. Styron remembers it as a scene out of Ovid, Humes as the high point of his career as an epicurean and scholar.

- Gay Talese, Looking for Hemingway

Some quotes from Aleksandar Hemon's Love and Obstacles:

"...a trembling voice that opened the worlds of permanent dusk, where sorrow reigned and the mere sight of a woman's neck caused maddening bouts of desire."

- 'The conductor', page 64

"One builds one's life on consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed. Now I could not understand the devout thoroughness of my childhood obsessions, the myriad origins of my overactive imagination - I could not quite summon who I used to be."

- 'American Commando', page 155

"When he was young, like me, he said, he used to think that all the great writers knew something he didn't. He thought that if he read their books they would teach him something, make him better; he thought he would acquire what they had: the wisdom, the truth, the wholeness, the real shit. He was burning to write, he wanted to break through to that fancy knowledge, he was hungry for it. But now he knew that that hunger was vainglorious; now he knew that writers knew nothing, really; most of them were just faking it. He knew nothing. There was nothing to know, nothing on the other side. There was no walker, no path, just walking. This was it, whoever you were, wherever you were, whatever it was, and you had to make peace with that fact."

- 'The noble truths of suffering', page 194

"A compact with one woman puts beyond reach what others might give us to enjoy; the soft blondes and the dark, aphrodisiacal women of our imaginations are set aside. Shall we leave life not knowing them? Must we?"

- Saul Bellow, Dangling Man

Bill O'Reilly proves the existence of his god. How humbling.

http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/the-colbert-report---january-6-2011/#clip396324

Another great quote to tide you over while I struggle to come up with my own material:

"If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days."

-Dorothy Canfield Fisher

It's possible I may get back to blogging in the near future. It's looking like I may have something to say. But for now, I'll just post this quote:

"There is a pleasure in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student, feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain."

- Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

While it would be dishonest to say I know much about the history of philosophy, this quote does a pretty good job of summing up my feelings on work.