It is not what the photograph shows—the subject—that is boring. It is photography that is boring.
Malcolm Scrivener, The Reclining of the West.
…[Henry Miller’s] Trilogy is not literature, but pseudoethnography—a delineation of behavior. What the “modern artist” is like. How he lives. The sex, the drugs, the drinking, the squalor, the sneering mockery aimed at ordinary people.
Palmer Coates, The Dark Afternoon of the Soul.
When the author says “I was in a state of despair,” do we believe him? Was he? Was he in despair? What does it mean to write down that sequence of words?
Ellis Nobodaddy, The Theory of Ice.
The radical just keeps going and going and going. He does not do this out of nobility of purpose. He does it because he cannot think of anything else to do.
Elihu Marras, A World of Smudges and Stains.
Who will be contented in that world where people get what they deserve?
William Davy, Revolutions of the Nineteenth Century.
Let’s delineate a world! By means of sentences! Or has Marx done that for us?
Ernest Ingram, The Unclean Sweep.
Why should anyone be excluded from anything? Or ever be denied anything?
Tanner Faust, A Scrapbook of Impertinent Interrogatives.
One thing in particular to which the contemporary artist conforms is the proposition that the artist is (or can be) radically inventive.
Albrecht Luggens, Ways of Serving Time.
If all cultures are equal, then why is it that only one culture—the western Europeans—developed the study of other cultures?
Evelyn Harbuckle, The Signs of Belonging.
Time has but one direction: backward. Photographs point inexorably to the past, to that which is old. As do our thoughts.
Mathew Muntz, Entropic Processes in Architecture.
