What I Bought
What I bought – 8 February 2012
And I fervently believe that there will come a time when no one will be burned and no one beheaded; when the criminal will plead for death as a mercy and deliverance and death will be denied him, for life will serve as his punishment just as death does today; when there will be no [...]
What I bought – 24 January and 1 February 2012
Despair and idleness are, I think, the chief motives for religious devotion. When we have nothing on earth to do or hope for we gaze at the sky. We kiss the holy ikons because we have nothing better to kiss. (Lawrence Durrell, from Pope Joan)
What I bought – 18 January 2012
“I’ve always believed, Josef, that we are more in love with desire than with the desired!” (Irvin D. Yalom, from When Nietzsche Wept)
What I bought – 11 January 2012
‘Once giants walked the earth,’ she repeated, emphatically. ‘Yes, titans absolutely, it’s a fact.’ Three mothers creaked and swung with expressions of fascinated absorption upon their smiling faces; but Raza Hyder took no notice, closed his eyes, grunted from time to time. ‘Now the pygmies have taken over, however,’ Bilquis confided. ‘Tiny personages. Ants. Once [...]
What I bought – 4 January 2012
It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God. (Mircea Eliade, from The Myth Of The Eternal Return)
What I bought – 28 December 2011
The Spartans were perfectly aware of the atrocious suffering they were inflicting and never imagined their victims could forget it. The solution was to establish terror as a normal condition of life — and that was Sparta’s great invention: to create a situation in which terror was seen as something normal. (Robert Calasso, from The [...]
What I bought – 21 December 2011
Was the rise of the radical intelligentsia desirable, was their unchecked progress necessary in order that mankind might be led to the broad uplands of democratic freedom? Or was the very concept of democratic freedom a blind alley, developed to make the world safe for an intelligentsia which is only happy when playing at politics, [...]
What I bought – 14 December 2011
“Truth, Vinicius, dwells somewhere so high that the gods themselves cannot see it from the top of Olympus. To you, carissime, your Olympus seems higher still, and, standing there, you call to me, ‘Come, you will see such sights as you have not seen yet!’ I might. But I answer, ‘I do not have feet [...]
What I bought – 7 December 2011
“A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs — it sucks — it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, [...]
What I bought – 30 November 2011
“Maybe I’m crazy. But there’s something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I’m so beautiful, then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking them out where I am, into the night, away from all trouble, all [...]
What I bought – 23 November 2011
He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth – but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy [...]
What I bought – 16 November 2011
Every man always has handy a dozen glib reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from The Gulag Archipelago)
What I bought – 9 November 2011
“We took unremarkable men: usual bankers, run-of-the-mill priests, ordinary soldiers and statesmen and wives – and sacramentalized their mediocrity. We smoothed their noons with strings divisi! We pierced their nights with chittarini! We gave them processions for their strutting – serenades for their rutting – high horns for their hunting, and drums for their wars! [...]
What I bought – 2 November 2011
All art is quite useless. (Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray)
What I bought – 26 October 2011
I understood it this evening: the author has to die in order for the reader to become aware of his truth. (Umberto Eco, from Foucault’s Pendulum)
