quotations: recent favorites

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
—Paul Gauguin

We seem to believe it possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.
—Don DeLillo

In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
—Steven Weinberg

The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.
—Viktor Shklovsky

Art, then, is an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent.
—Gaston Bachelard

Political parties exist to organize and institutionalize human weakness. It is their one success.
—William Gass

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
—Arthur Schopenhauer

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
—Thomas Mann

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
—John Cage