Quote of the Week: Edjumicated

"So far my interactions at the [Tax Day 2010 Tea Party] rally were only reinforcing my private theory -- I suppose you might call it a prejudice -- that liberals are the ones who went to college, moved to the nearest city where no one would call them a fag, and now only go back for holidays; conservatives are the ones who married their high school girlfriends, bought houses in the their hometowns, and kept going to church and giving a shit who won the homecoming game. It's the divide between the Got Out and the Stayed Put. This theory also accounts for the different reactions of these two camps when the opposition party takes power, raising the specter of either fascist or socialist tyranny: the Got Outs always fantasize about fleeing the country for someplace more civilized -- Canada, France, New Zealand; the Stayed Put just dig further in, hunkering down in compounds, buying up canned goods and ammo."
 - Tim Kreider, "When They're Not Assholes," p.63 in We Learn Nothing

Quote of the Week: I Have Always Loved You-Hoo-Hoo-Hoo

"There's a fine line between the bold romantic gesture and stalking. The tricky crux of the matter is that it depends to a great extent on how that gesture is going to be received -- which factor, unfortunately, the impetuous suitor/obsessed stalker has lost all ability to gauge. A friend of mine reports that all the women he's polled have been enthusiastic advocates of the bold romantic gesture, but this, he suspects, is because they're automatically picturing John Cusack making it, not Steve Buscemi or Peter Lorre or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Often you don't know whether you're the hero of a romantic comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives."
 - Tim Kreider, "The Creature Walks Among Us," p.12 in We Learn Nothing

Quote of the Week

"I've got a pair of socks I like better than you."
 - Hollowblue, "First Avenue"

Here, have a video of the whole song:

Quote of the Week

End of Verse 1:

So much that we so grandly call love
Is simply in our heads.
How many doors slammed closed,
And stepped-on toes,
And songs composed,
And poems and prose,
About things we've heard and words nobody said?

End of Verse 2:

Love only lasts as long as it lasts,
Goes as far as it goes,
And it goes pretty goddamn fast.
Sometimes love is fun,
Sometimes burdensome,
Sometimes hard up,
Sometimes hard won.
But you can only miss it if it's gone.

 - Harvey Danger (lyrics by Sean Nelson), "The Show Must Not Go On"

Quote of the Week

"Ye're smart, aren't yer? Think I don't know what's going on... wi' books from London and all that rot. Now you listen to me. She's mine, I tell you...mine. She's my woman, same as a hen belongs to a cock, and no one don't have her except me, ye see? She were promised to me the day she were born, by her Grandmother. I put a cross in water-vole's blood on her feedin'-bottle when she was an hour old, to mark her for mine, and held her up so's she might see it and know she was mine... And every year since then, on her birthday, I've taken her up to Ticklepenny Corner and we've hung over th' old well until we see a water-vole, and I've said to her, I've said, 'Remember.' And all she would saw was: 'What, Cousin Urk?' But she knows all right. She knows. When the water-voles mate under the may trees this summer I'll make her mine. Dick Hawk-Monitor...what's he? A bit of a boy! Playin' at horses in a red coat, like his daddy afore him.Many a time I've lay and laughed at 'em...fools. Me and the water-voles, we can afford to wait for what we want so you heed what I say, miss. Elfin's mine. I doan't mind her bein' a bit above me" (here his voice thickened in a manner which causes Mrs. Beetle to make a sound resembling 't-t-t-t-') " 'cause a man likes his piece to be a bit dainty. But she's mine--"

"We heard," said Flora; "you said it before"

Stella Gibbons's glorious Cold Comfort Farm is endlessly quotable, but I particularly like this bit of local color on pp.140-141.

If you haven't read Cold Comfort Farm yet, you've missed one of the funniest books of the 20th century -- but you can fix that quickly.

Quote of the Week

The whole post is worth reading, but the last line is the killer:

"I think an awful lot of what passes for political discourse in this country these days works off that principle: There's money in making stupid people mad."
 - Mark Evanier

Quote of the Week: Burn!

"If you’ve ever actually been burned, for instance — like, if your skin has come in contact with something really, really hot, I think that’s a way worse feeling than experiencing a piece of culture that you find unsatisfying."
 - Daniel Handler, on being presented with a commentator who was "burned" because A Series of Unfortunate Events had "more questions than answers"

Quote of the Week: The Novel and the New

I haven't had one of these in a while, have I? Well, I won't promise anything I can't guarantee, but perhaps more will follow.

"She should have studied science, not spent all of her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on."
 - Kate Atkinson, Case Histories, p.42

Quote of the Week: Creative Destruction

"There are more than 27 million businesses in the United States. About a thousand are huge conglomerates seeking to increase profits. Another several thousand are small or medium-size companies seeking their big score. A vast majority, however, are what economists call lifestyle businesses. They are owned by people whose goal is to do what they like and to cover their nut. These surviving proprietors [in the gentrifying West Village] hadn't merely been lucky. They loved their businesses so much that they found a way to hold on to them, even if it meant making bad business decisions. It's a remarkable accomplishment in its own right."
-Adam Davidson, "Jane Jacobs Vs. Marc Jacobs," The New York Times Sunday Magazine, June 10, 2012, p. 18

The Unhelpful Phrase In My Head All Day

"Ain't no loathing like self-loathing."
     -They Might Be Giants, "The Fellowship of Hell"