Blockquote
A NOTEBOOK · EMPHASIS MINE
The block quotation is a typographic device used to designate an extended quoted passage. A block quote appears as its own verical unit and is distinguished from surrounding text through indentation, italics, type size, or some combination of these. The <blockquote> tag dates to the first draft of HTML.
Blockquote.org is the weblog of Justin Skolnick.
In time all quotations will be properly documented, because it matters.
“I have you placed as the type that loses the girl to the George Raft type or the William Powell type. You are steady, faithful, you get stood up. The older women would know better. The mothers are on your side. With what they been through, if it was up to them, they’d take you in a minute.”
— Maurice Venice in Seize the Day
“To me, there’s nothing wrong with conscious capitalism,” he says. “I gave up being a Trotskyite in college. We want to make a lot of money doing this. This is not the 1960s anymore, when you had to feel guilty making money and doing something that’s right.”
— Michael Altenberg in the Chicago Reader, 3/9/07, p. 18
Altenberg will open Crust, “the fourth certified organic restaurant in the country and the first in Chicago,” at Division and Hoyne.
old roommate
She’ll say terrible things about me, all true. I asked her to compromise, knowing compromise against her principles, said I don’t have a problem with your alcoholic boyfriend staying but don’t let his idiot junkie friends think they’ve got a couch to crash when they can’t get to the clinic in time.
I have, to be sure, sharply attacked ungodly doctrines in general, and I have snapped at my opponents, not because of their bad morals, but because of their ungodliness. ... I have no quarrel with any man concerning his morals but only concerning the word of truth.
— Martin Luther, “An Open Letter to Pope Leo X”
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.
— Edward Said, Orientalism
Our God is an ass-kicking God
Rise up, O Lord!
Deliver me, O my God!
For you strike all my enemies on the cheek;
you break the teeth of the wicked.
— Psalm 3:7
It cannot be emphasized enough, I think, that no Arab feels any of the sort of guilt or shame that every Westerner (apparently) feels, or is impelled to show he is feeling, for that horrible chapter in history. For a Palestinian Arab, therefore, it is not taboo: to speak of “Jews” in connection with Israel and its supporters, to make comparisons between the Israeli and the German occupations, to excoriate journalism that reports Jewish suffering but ignores, or discounts, Israel’s razing of Arab homes and villages, ...
— Edward Said, “The Palestinian Experience”
It’s startling that Said wrote this almost forty years ago.
Garlic with white wine, a clean napkin, the waitress’s perfume. Diesel, Mexican laundry, exhaled smoke, cut conifers, perfume.
Squinting against the sun on the Fullerton El platform this morning, I found a dent, chiseled a good quarter-inch deep, where the canopy funneled melting snow into the edge of a board. 33º, tomorrow’s high 18.
Suppose that I am absolutely right and the Monsignor, for instance, absolutely wrong. If I am right, the problem of the world’s coherence, and all responsibility for it, becomes mine. How will it make out when Moses E. Herzog has his way? No, why should I take that on myself? The Church has universal understanding. This I consider a harmful, Prussian delusion. Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity. Did Valentine Gersbach ever admit ignorance of any matter? He was a regular Goethe. He finished all your sentences, rephrased all your thoughts, explained everything.
— Saul Bellow, Herzog