"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:— Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world (...)"

Laurence Sterne in the opening of his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

"No hay influencia buena, Mr. Gray, toda influencia es inmoral, inmoral desde el punto de vista científico (...) porque influir sobre una persona es transmitirle nuestra propia alma. No piensa ya con sus pensamientos naturales, no se consume con sus pasiones naturales, sus virtudes no son reales para ella, sus pecados –si es que hay algo semejante a pecados– son prestados, se convierte en eco de una música ajena, el actor de una obra que no fue escrita para ella. El fin de la vida es el propio desenvolvimiento; realizar la propia naturaleza perfectamente. Eso es lo que debemos hacer; lo malo es que las gentes se están asustadas de sí mismas hoy día, han olvidado el más elevado de todos los deberes, el deber para consigo mismo.

(...)

Nos vemos castigados por nuestras negaciones, cada impulso que intentamos aniquilar, germina en la mente y nos envenena, el cuerpo peca primero y se satisface con su pecado, porque la acción es un modo de purificación, no nos queda más que el recuerdo de un placer o la voluptuosidad de una pena, el único medio de desembarazarse de una tentación, es ceder a ella; si las resistimos nuestras almas crecerán enfermizas, deseando las cosas que se han prohibido a sí mismas y además, sentirán deseo por lo que unas leyes monstruosas han hecho monstruoso e ilegal.

(...)

Me pregunto quién definió al hombre como un animal racional, es la más prematura de las definiciones. El hombre es una multitud de cosas, pero no es racional; me encanta al fin y al cabo que no lo sea."

 Lord Henry en El Retrato de Dorian Gray por Oscar Wilde

"They were not holding hands, but their shadows were"

Beloved, Toni Morrison

"(...) the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay."

Beloved, Toni Morrison

"Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there—and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end."

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

You might think that you have a good english... then Faulkner happens and you see how little you know and understand.

For the last 7 days I had to read, analyze, write about, expose about and discuss, As I Lay Dying by Faulkner, in American Literature class (yes, just 7 f****g days per novel, reading and writing every day including Sundays) and I can say 3 things:
1) I'm exhausted
2) Faulkner is SO DAMN COMPLICATED and AMAZING!!!
and
3) I don't have the level for this class but I'm gonna make it somehow.

Since we are in the subject, this is a quote from the book. Not THE quote, just one I was passing by right now:

"(...) I would think how words go straight up in a thin, line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and can not have until they forget the words."

And the word of the day is:

Voicelessness.
I love the way it sounds on a southern accent.

«(…)  in our contemporary society, which prizes individualism and shows little patience for the emotionally needy in our midst, it has become taboo to be lonely. (…) The result of such ideology is that we often keep quiet about our loneliness, our need for connection—more so today than a century ago. It seems unlikely that anyone would today join a “lonely club.” To do so would broadcast a discomfort with solitary individualism, and make all too apparent a vulnerability that seems needy and, to some, pathetic. We have internalized the emotional style of individualism, and learned to suppress the feelings that so often dog us. That doesn’t mean they aren’t there; it just means we can’t talk about them — which may make us even lonelier.»

How loneliness became taboo, Susan J. Matt in OUPblog

"Memory is fascinating. Take this psychological experiment... A group of people were shown 10 various childhood images, nine were really from their childhood and one was fake: their portrait was pasted into a fairground they never visited. Eight percent recognized themselves... They recognized the fake photo as real! Twenty percent couldn't remember. The researchers asked them again. The second time, the others said that they remembered the image "Such a wonderful day at the park with my parents." They remembered a completely fabricated experience. Memory is dynamic. It's alive. If some details are missing, memory fills the holes with things that never happened."

Vals Im Bashir (2008), Ari Folman

Why RELATIVITY?!

"The term relativity refers to time and space. According to Galileo and Newton, time and space were absolute entities, and the moving systems of the universe were dependent on this absolute time and space. On this conception was built the science of mechanics. The resulting formulas sufficed for all motions of a slow nature; it was found, however, that they would not conform to the rapid motions apparent in electrodynamics.
This led the Dutch professor, Lorentz, and myself to develop the theory of special relativity. Briefly, it discards absolute time and space and makes them in every instance relative to moving systems. By this theory all phenomena in electrodynamics, as well as mechanics, hitherto irreducible by the old formulae—and there are multitudes—were satisfactorily explained.
Till now it was believed that time and space existed by themselves, even if there was nothing else—no sun, no earth, no stars—while now we know that time and space are not the vessel for the universe, but could not exist at all if there were no contents, namely, no sun, earth and other celestial bodies."

Albert Einstein, quoted by Hendrik Antoon Lorentz in his book The Einstein Theory of Relativity

«En una hoguera, casi ciegos y salvajes como seres primitivos, más instintivos que racionales»

La ciudad
Kavafis

Dices: "Iré a otra tierra, hacia otro mar
y una ciudad mejor con certeza hallaré.
Pues cada esfuerzo mío está aquí condenado,
Y muere mi corazón
lo mismo que mis pensamientos en esta desolada languidez.
Donde vuelvo los ojos sólo veo
las oscuras ruinas de mi vida
y los muchos años que aquí pasé o destruí".

No hallarás otra tierra ni otro mar.
La ciudad irá en ti siempre. Volverás
a las mismas calles. Y en los mismos suburbios llegará tu vejez;
en la misma casa encanecerás.
Pues la ciudad es siempre la misma. Otra no busques -no la hay-
ni caminos ni barco para ti.
La vida que aquí perdiste
la has destruido en toda la tierra.

"People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring. Go figure. For me, I might have the leisure to be bored, but not to grow tired of something. Most people can't distinguish between the two."

Kafka on the shore, Haruki Murakami

"Raindrops beat against the glass, blurring streetlights alongside the road that stretch off into the distance at identical intervals like they were set down to measure the earth."

Kafka on the shore, Haruki Murakami

"No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others."

Kafka on the shore, Haruki Murakami

"—Oh, a quién quiero engañar, soy un idiota.
—Ay Homero, si te sientes mal contigo mismo, puedes hacer muchas cosas para mejorar.
—¿Otro baño de cerveza?
—Bueno, eso o puedes tomar un curso de educación para adultos.
—¡AH! ¿Y CÓMO ES QUE LA EDUCACIÓN VA A HACERME "MÁS INTELIGENTE"? Además, cada vez que aprendo algo nuevo, empuja algo viejo en mi cerebro. ¿Recuerdas cuando tomé ese curso de vinos y se me olvidó conducir?
—¡PORQUE ESTABAS EBRIO!
—Ay… qué ricoo."

Homero y Marge
Los Simpsons, s05e22, en Secretos de un buen matrimonio.

"—Pero las estrellas del rock deben beber y embriagarse y embriagarse. (Homero)
—Y tener chicas con largas piernas que usan muy bien. (Apu)
—Y ¿por qué no puedo conducir a alta velocidad? (Otto)"

Los Simpsons, s14e02, en El campamento fantástico del Rock n' Roll de los Rolling Stones.

“En efecto, atenienses, temer la muerte no es otra cosa que creer ser sabio sin serlo, pues es creer que uno sabe lo que no sabe. Pues nadie conoce la muerte, ni siquiera si es, precisamente, el mayor de todos los bienes para el hombre, pero la temen como si supieran con certeza que es el mayor de los males.”

Sócrates en la Apología
Diálogos, Platón

"La Delta de Dirac no es una función estrictamente hablando puesto que se puede ver que requeriría tomar valores infinitos, a veces informalmente se define la delta de Dirac como el límite de una sucesión de funciones, que tienda a cero en todo punto del espacio excepto en un punto para el cual divergería hacia infinito."

Delta de Dirac, Wikipedia

"Abundan las escenas que sobran (y, por tanto, aburren), los planos que reiteran (y, por tanto, aburren), o las palabras que duplican lo dicho en imágenes (y, por tanto, aburren): por poner sólo tres ejemplos."

Post: Algo parecido a la felicidad: 22/04/2010, Revista miradas de cine nº 97: Enrique Pérez Romero

"(...) “no nos confundamos, el mal existe en el mundo”. ¡Claro que existe! Pero no está sólo allí donde los autoproclamados hombres de bien dicen verlo, sino que habita en la naturaleza humana, esa misma que está presente en hombres de todas la ideologías, de todas las nacionalidades. Por eso la guerra no es justa, es simplemente el fracaso de la razón, la justificación del miedo que se apodera cada día de nuestras sociedades y que nos obnubila hasta tal punto que todo aquel que la cuestione será tildado sin demora como un débil y cobarde, mientras quien se muestre dispuesto a llevarla a cabo en nombre de altos ideales, será entonces reconocido como aquel que trae consigo la promesa de la felicidad futura. Pero tal promesa, sin ninguna duda, siempre es falsa, pues sólo hay una promesa posible en la guerra, como el propio Barack dijo aquel frío día en Noruega sin que nadie tosiera incómodamente ante semejante incoherencia: “no importa cuán justificada esté, la guerra siempre es una promesa de tragedia humana”."

Post: El fácil y mentiroso maniqueísmo de los hombres de bien: 06/04/2010, Blog Ceremonias de exterior: Gabriel Ruiz Romero