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Chris Lavergne

4,407 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,407 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“In college, reading all those Greek tragedies and listening to the lectures about them, I would think, rather blithely, 'Well, that tragic flaw thing is nicely symmetrical: whatever makes Oedipus heroic is also—' What did I know then? Nothing. I didn’t feel in my bones as I do now that what powers our drive assures our downfall, that our birth date is our death sentence. You’re fated to kill your dad and marry your mom, so they send you away. You live with your new mom and dad, find out about the curse, run off and kill your real dad, marry your real mom. It was a setup. You had to test it. Even though you knew it would cost you your eyes, you had to do it. You had to push ahead. You had to prove who you are.”
— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life
Tagged: Identity, Oedipus
“By 1950, roads spanned across the continent. By 1980, the Interstate Highway System reached into 48 states linking all major U.S. cities. By 2008, there were 2,734,102 miles of paved public roads in the U.S. (with an additional 1,324,245 miles of unpaved public roads). In four generations, the U.S. went from zero paved roads to over 2.7 million miles of road extending into almost every parcel of land in the country. In four generations, we went from wondering if there was a way to reach a destination … to never thinking about if we can get there, just how many hours it will take. The baseline shift — from wilderness landscape to lifeless grid — happened so slowly and gradually that few of us ever noticed. Just millions of unremarkable changes and then … we open our eyes to find a world wholly unrecognizable from the one we were born into.”
— Anonymous, adbusters.org
Tagged: Connection, Relationalism, Roads
“The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word.”
— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
Tagged: Against Decoration, Writing, My Philosophy, Poetry
“In writing, the most enthralling moment is that of condensation, ellipsis, rarefaction. Building up increasingly dense nuclei around which light is disoriented, and thought too, since it lost the sense of its origin.”
— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories II: 1987-1990
Tagged: Against Decoration, Writing
“To push anything back into the past is equivalent to reducing it to its simplest elements. ”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
Tagged: Reductionism
“I’m finding it harder to just ‘write.’ The seeking and sculpting of found text or sound have become my primary ‘artistic’ function. Actually generating that text or music seems increasingly difficult. Lately I’ll sit down with a blank pad and feel like I really have to dig down deep to get my own voice to come out over the ‘sample choir.’ It’s a very strange feeling, like a conductor trying to sing over the orchestra, and is, I believe, a fairly new one for artists.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
Tagged: Commonplace Book, Quotes, Writing
“Book publishing is not a conventional business. It more closely resembles a vocation or an amateur sport in which the primary goal is the activity itself rather than its financial outcome. For owners and editors willing to work for the joy of the task, book publishing in my time has been immensely rewarding. For investors looking for conventional returns, it has been disappointing.”
— Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future
Tagged: Book Publishing
“The public sphere thus promotes ubiquitous commentators who deliberately detach themselves from the local practices out of which specific issues grow and in terms of which these issues must be resolved though some sort of committed action. What seems a virtue to detached Enlightenment reason, therefore, looks like a disastrous drawback to Kierkegaard. The public sphere is a world in which everyone has an opinion on and comments on all public matters without needing any first-hand experience and without having or wanting any responsibility. Even the most conscientious commentators don’t have to have firsthand experience or take a concrete stand. Rather, they justify their views by citing principles, and, as Kierkegaard notes with disapproval, their 'ability, virtuosity and good sense consists in trying to reach a judgment and a decision without ever going so far as action.' Moreover, since the conclusions such abstract reasoning reaches are not grounded in the local practices, its solutions are equally abstract. Such proposals would presumably not enlist the commitment of the people involved and therefore not work even if acted upon. Kierkegaard concludes that 'what...the speakers at a meeting understand perfectly presented to them as a thought or an observation, they cannot understand at all in the form of action.'”
— Hubert Dreyfus, socrates.berkeley.edu
Tagged: Media, Public sphere, The Uprooting, The Problem of Knowledge Abstraction
“CNN was not under traditional corporate control, so it could present news without worrying about who or what was impacted; its always-on format meant the newsroom was not under the obligation to craft events into satisfying packages for a single evening broadcast; its position on the cable dial lowered expectations for high-budget production values; and, finally, its freedom from traditional narrative made it less suspect in the post-Watergate era. Like Ted Turner himself, CNN would be renegade, free of corporate or government control, and utterly uncensored. This is why the network came under such widespread attack in its earlier days from traditional news media, academics, and politicians. Contrary to journalistic standards of the day, CNN let Saddam Hussein speak directly to the American people.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Media, Saddam Hussein, CNN, Media Companies
“Why is this so hard for so many of us? It's not because we need the email for our productivity, but because we are addicted to the possibility that there's a great tidbit in there somewhere. Like compulsive gamblers at a slot machine rewarded with a few quarters every dozen tries, we are trained to keep opening emails in the hope of a little shot of serotonin— a pleasant ping from the world of chronos. We must retrain ourselves instead to see the reward in the amount of time we get to spend in the reverie of solo contemplation or live engagement with another human being.”
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Tagged: Emai