The speed of contemporary art: Like a clever one-frame cartoon, a piece of contemporary art gets old quick. It becomes something tiresome—something oppressive—to look at.
Ellison Malmo, Hypertrophy and Decline in Visual Art.
“Your childhood, William, has nothing at all to do with your hideous ways as an adult—your crimes, your sneering insolence.” Patricia exaggerated, of course. But how much?
Jason Starling, ed., Adventures in Narrative Parsimony.
We have painted the nineteenth century gray. But what if it should turn out that ours is the dull way, and that the Victorian Age was fascinating? Endlessly fascinating?
Robin Christopher, The Incantation Theory of Historical Truth.
Layer upon layer of hoodwinking. Some of it self-directed. This accounts for the “success” of modernist painting.
Connor Eastwicke, Fear of the Orthogonal.
The lecturer read these two lines aloud: “the smoke thereof shall go up forever” and “the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it”. He steadfastly refused to disclose the source.
Alex Wimsey, Recollections of the Fairport Convention.
They will inevitably say: “Yes, but the mathematics of string theory eventually might be useful.” And I will remind them that what is actually useful is the expression “might be.”
Christopher Valerian, In Search of Boundary Conditions.
And now when she hears a dog bark—or hears anything else—she runs up the stairs in terror.
Christina Rubb, The Awful Puzzle.
Osborne was found perpetrating cruelty upon perfectly innocent objects. This won him the everlasting wrath of Mr. Staunton.
Lane Vivian, A Knob of Old Cheese and Ten Short Tales.
I do not despise my culture. Nevertheless, I do dislike some aspects of it intensely. Rousseau and Romanticism come to mind.
Algernon Webb, A Speculative Autobiography.
—We must remember that hatred of others is really displaced hatred of oneself.
—Oh? And what about hatred of oneself, then? Where does that come from?
Philip Cavendish, Tilly’s Treasury of Colloquial Bits.
dennis scharnberg 