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Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
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George Jean Nathan
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Art is a communication informing man of his own dignity, and of the value of his life, whether in joy or grief, whether in laughter or indignation, beauty or terror...Man needs the comfort of his own dignity...And that's what the artisf is for. To give him that comfort.
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Robert Nathan
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The pain of regret is far worse than the pain of discipline.
We will never have the anointing, the ministry or the revivals of our heroes if we don’t become as disciplined as they were. They went to bed early to get up early to pray, and they fasted for days on end.
We shouldn’t just pray to mark it off of our lists or read a few chapters of our Bible each day to keep up with the church Bible reading chart. We must have a deeper purpose for doing these tasks.
Discipline without direction is drudgery. In other words, discipline has to have a purpose to drive it each and every day.
The price for spiritual change is expensive, but the rewards are far greater.
The world’s ways, ideologies, and influence cannot be present in a life dedicated to Jesus because consecration’s purpose is for us to be different from the world. And, for that matter, if we are separate from the world, then sin must not be a part of our lives either. Sin ruins a life of consecration.
It would be a shame to believe that holiness is nothing more than rules or guidelines we are to live by. Holiness and consecration flow from a life given to the spiritual disciplines, a life we can only maintain by continuing to seek for Him daily.
Your pursuit will never be greater than your disciplines.
No man is greater than his prayer life.
Even though Jesus requires us to pray, praying is not to be done out of duty, but it is to be done out of delight.
A person’s appetite reveals much about their physical health. Our physical appetite can reveal just as much about our spiritual health.
Prayer is the dominant discipline in a godly life and it takes a backseat to no other task. Prayer is the guiding force to a life of consecration and spiritual discipline.
Self-denial is tough, but self-indulgence is dangerous.
”
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Nathan Whitley (The Lost Art Of Spiritual Disciplines)
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The forgotten art of focusing on one task at a time is a treasure, a joy, and the gateway to a life of prayer.
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Nathan Foster (The Making of an Ordinary Saint: My Journey from Frustration to Joy with the Spiritual Disciplines)
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When we step onto the bridge, Nathan turns and spreads his arms out wide. ‘Welcome to Pont des Arts, a.k.a. The Lock Bridge.
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Ashley Earley (Alone in Paris)
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Safety and security indeed stifles creativity! The more I suffer the better I create. Yet again I create to live of it safe and secure one day, if not everyday...
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Nathan Haddish Mogos
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I think great art is like a miracle. It shows us things we wouldn’t have imagined ourselves. It makes us see the world differently. It makes things we thought were impossible, possible.
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Nathan Kotecki (The Suburban Strange)
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He smirks, shaking his head and letting his eyes wander. I watch him carefully, wondering what I can say to get him to leave. “I’m not leaving until you answer some questions. Plus, I’m holding your sketchbook hostage, so you might want to cooperate.”
I raise an eyebrow at him. I guess there isn’t much I can say. “This isn’t a hostage negotiation.”
He chuckles half-heartedly as his eyes take me in, almost sizing me up. “I guess I should introduce myself.” He holds a hand out for me to shake. “I’m Nathan.”
I stare at his hand for a moment. “Taylor,” I reply, meeting his eyes again without taking his hand.
He lets his hand fall back to his side. “At least I got you to say something non-hostile.”
“I haven’t been hostile,” I object.
His eyebrows shoot up. “Oh, haven’t you?”
“Why don’t you leave me alone?” I snap. “Leave and don’t come back.” I move passed him, heading for my apartment. He can’t follow and annoy me if I lock the door.
“Where are you going?” he demands. I look back over my shoulder and roll my eyes at him, indicating the answer should be obvious: anywhere he isn’t. Once inside, I slam the door behind me.
“That was totally not hostile!” he calls after me, sarcastically. I quickly head for my bedroom door, slamming it, too.
”
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Ashley Earley (Alone in Paris)
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You know, there used to be a difference between authentic music and sellout music. I'm talking about when I was young, in the sixties? Back then we knew there was a soullessness to the sellouts, and we wanted to be on the side of the artists. But now? Being a sellout is the authentic thing. When Molly Miller says 'I'm just being real,' what she means is that everyone wants money and fame and any artist who claims otherwise is lying. the only fundamental truth is greed, and the only question is who is up front about this. That's the new authenticity. Molly Miler can never be accused of selling out because selling out was her goal all along.
”
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Nathan Hill (The Nix)
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When the man hath, with his whole nature, cast away his sin, there is no room for forgiveness any more, for God dwells in him, and he in God. With the voice of Nathan, "Thou art the man," the forgiveness of God laid hold of David, the heart of the king was humbled to the dust; and when he thus awoke from the moral lethargy that had fallen upon him, he found that he was still with God. "When I awake," he said, "I am still with thee.
”
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George MacDonald (Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III.)
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This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke and in the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs. I'm not sure if there is any pattern to these selections. I did not spend a lot of time with those that seemed afraid to tell stories, that handled plot as if it were a hair in the soup, unwelcome and embarrassing. I also tended not to revisit stories that seemed bleak without having earned it, where the emotional notes were false, or where the writing was tricked out or primped up with fashionable devices stressing form over content. I do know that the easiest and the first choices were the stories to which I had a physical response. I read Jennifer Egan's "Out of Body" clenched from head to toe by tension as her suicidal, drug-addled protagonist moves through the Manhattan night toward an unforgivable betrayal. I shed tears over two stories of childhood shadowed by unbearable memory: "The Hare's Mask," by Mark Slouka, with its piercing ending, and Claire Keegan's Irishinflected tale of neglect and rescue, "Foster." Elizabeth McCracken's "Property" also moved me, with its sudden perception shift along the wavering sightlines of loss and grief. Nathan Englander's "Free Fruit for Young Widows" opened with a gasp-inducing act of unexpected violence and evolved into an ethical Rubik's cube. A couple of stories made me laugh: Tom Bissell's "A Bridge Under Water," even as it foreshadows the dissolution of a marriage and probes what religion does for us, and to us; and Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall," a deftly comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life, and a lifetime. Some stories didn't call forth such a strong immediate response but had instead a lingering resonance. Of these, many dealt with love and its costs, leaving behind indelible images. In Megan Mayhew Bergman's "Housewifely Arts," a bereaved daughter drives miles to visit her dead mother's parrot because she yearns to hear the bird mimic her mother's voice. In Allegra Goodman's "La Vita Nuova," a jilted fiancée lets her art class paint all over her wedding dress. In Ehud Havazelet's spare and tender story, "Gurov in Manhattan," an ailing man and his aging dog must confront life's necessary losses. A complicated, only partly welcome romance blossoms between a Korean woman and her demented
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Geraldine Brooks (The Best American Short Stories 2011)
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There is nothing more urgent these days than the call to practice spiritual disciplines. Or, to put it better, there is nothing more urgent than actually practicing spiritual disciplines.
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Nathan Whitley (The Lost Art of Spiritual Disciplines)
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”
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Mark Nathan (NERF: The Ultimate Reference)
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Art is the sex of imagination.
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George Jean Nathan (Five Great Modern Irish Plays)
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So many women have cancer now. Do you think a new esthetic can develop? Cancer beauty? I mean, if there could be heroin chic, the esthetic of the death-wishing drug addict? Will non-cancerous women be begging their cosmetic surgeons to give them fake node implants under their chins and around their necks? Under their arms? In their groins? So sexy, that fullness. And it works so well as an anti-aging technique, to fill out that sagging turkey neck. Who wouldn't want it? And the jewelry, the titanium pellets piercing those tits. So S&M/bondage."
Dunja kept talking in Nathan's head as he segued into a parallel inner dialogue with her about health and evolution, about the theory that concepts of beauty were not just concepts, but perceptions of indicators of reproductive potential and therefore of youth, about selfish genes using our bodies as vehicles only to perpetuate themselves, about how perhaps cancer genes could begin to make their own case for reproductive immortality as well, and so they too would put immense pressure on cultural acceptance of formerly taboo concepts of beauty, concepts which used to indicate disease and nearness to death but now mesmerized and seduced and mimicked youth and ripeness and health, and so her little fantasy of a culture forming around her own dire straits could theoretically...
Nathan could only just manage to keep looking into her searching eyes, feeling at that moment very sentimental and ordinary, and therefore mute. Could he really say anything about classical concepts of art, and therefore beauty, based on harmony, as opposed to modern theories, post-industrial-revolution, post-psychoanalysis, based on sickness and dysfunction? Could he make a case for her new, diseased self as the most avant-garde form of womanly beauty? He didn't dare, but she did.
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David Cronenberg (Consumed)
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At that moment I saw my duty. ‘I will assist.’ I exclaimed, ‘this good divine in his struggle to uphold those domestic virtues without which the arts decay, religions decline, and nations disappear.
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Robert Nathan (The Bishop's Wife)
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Criticism is the art wherewith a critic tries to guess himself into a share of the artist’s fame.
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George Jean Nathan (The House of Satan)
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The roads were still a slough, and he trod the soft mud as if it were quicksand pulling him under—yet the foliage was bold enough to pass for art, and the woods exuded the pleasant smell of wet leaves, such that the entire walk felt so refreshing he would’ve considered his arrival in town enough activity to turn around and go home if he’d had no obligations to attend to.
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Nathan Harris (The Sweetness of Water)
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There are no small fascisms.
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Patrick Nathan (Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist)
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I’m giving you the opportunity to be involved in a very high-quality private catering event. Isn’t that something you’re supposed to be training for?’ Nathan hissed. ‘I don’t care what Maude may or may not feel. This is business.’ The door was opened by an attractive middle-aged woman wearing a crisp grey pencil skirt, forest-green blouse and black stilettos, standing in the doorway. ‘Ah, Mr DaCosta? The catering? Perfect timing.’ Lila suddenly felt dowdy in her catering whites. ‘And your colleague? Welcome. I’m Sarah, the housekeeper; I’ll show you where to set up.’ They followed Sarah into the house, her high heels clicking on a perfect white marble floor. Lila wondered if she ever lost her balance on such a slippery surface, especially in those heels. A housekeeper wearing what looked suspiciously like Louboutins wasn’t quite what Lila had expected. She was cross with Nathan and wished she’d never come, even though the extra money was useful. Still, she thought to herself, she was here now, and Nathan was her boss. So she was stuck here. ‘Just checking it’s a party of twenty?’ Nathan asked her as they traversed the long hall, hung with old-fashioned oil portraits intermixed with modern paintings. Just that wall of art would probably pay for my flat, Lila thought, admiring
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Kennedy Kerr (Secrets of Magpie Cove (Magpie Cove, #2))
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For the purposes of this book, “art” is anything that allows you to disconnect from the logical world and get into a flow state. Flow states are defined as feeling mental readiness and alertness while being deeply involved in a task that generates either excitement or enjoyment in a person. You’re absorbed in what you’re doing but don’t feel as though you’re exerting any energy. It’s as if you’ve plugged into some universal well of positive creative energy that allows you to keep working on a task without distraction or anxiety, almost as if you’ve escaped from time itself. The term was coined in 1975 by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályia
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Nathan M. Hall (Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft)
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To our modern minds, we hear “cave art” and think cavemen, who, thanks to some early bad science and pop culture, became the epitome of the crude, unthinking dullard smashing rocks together and senselessly assaulting their compatriots. What needs to be remembered about these people—if there are any assumptions we can make about a people who lived so incredibly long ago—is the bravery and spark of divinity in creating paints that have lasted scores of millennia and the attempt to use figurative expression to capture what their world was like and what it meant to them.
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Nathan M. Hall (Path of the Moonlit Hedge: Discovering the Magick of Animistic Witchcraft)
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I don't think I care very much about being rich, Jennie. I just want to paint--and to know what I'm painting. That's what's so hard--to know what you're painting; to reach to something beyond these little, bitter times...
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Robert Nathan (Portrait of Jennie)
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The contempt that critics held for Langdon Pryce was nothing compared with the scorn he reserved for them. In his view, critics were responsible for untold misery for which they should be held to
account. Most of them either didn’t know or didn’t care how destructive their words could be. If snobby art critics had been kinder to a young Adolf Hitler, the entire twentieth century could have been a lot more pleasant for everyone.
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Nathan Allen (Horrorshow)
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To learn how to love your enemies, read the Bible. To learn how to survive them, read the Art of War.
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Nathan Thompson (Downfall And Rise (Challenger's Call, #1))
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Apart from his duties as a man of God, López also wrote one of the first books about chess: Libro de la invencion liberal y arte del juego del axedrez.
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Nathan Rose (Chess Opening Names: The Fascinating & Entertaining History Behind The First Few Moves (The Chess Collection Book 1))
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—Los novelistas son los mayores mentirosos de la historia, ¿no?
—No, esos son los políticos. Y los historiadores. Y los periodistas. Pero los novelistas, no. —¡Claro que sí! Cuando en sus novelas hacen como que cuentan lo que es la vida, están mintiendo. La vida es demasiado compleja para someterla a una ecuación o encerrarla entre las páginas de un libro. Tiene más fuerza que las matématicas la ficción. Las novelas son ficción. Y la ficción, técnicamente, es una mentira. .
—Si solo quieres hacer cosas que están permitidas, nunca serás un buen novelista. NI siquiera un artista. La historia del arte es la historia de la transgresión.
—Está jugando con las palabras, Nathan. —Es lo que hacen los escritores.
—Creía que usted ya no era escritor.
—Escritor un día, escritor toda la vida".
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Guillaume Musso (La vie secrète des écrivains)
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—Eso es ilegal...
—Si solo quieres hacer cosas que están permitidas, nunca serás un buen novelista. NI siquiera un artista. La historia del arte es la historia de la transgresión.
—Está jugando con las palabras, Nathan.
—Es lo que hacen los escritores.
—Creía que usted ya no era escritor.
—Escritor un día, escritor toda la vida".
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Guillaume Musso (La vie secrète des écrivains)
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If you want a vision of the bleak, bland capitalist future, go to Hudson Yards in New York City, the new, billion-dollar complex of gleaming skyscrapers. It's a lifeless shopping mall for luxury goods, intensely policed and surveilled, where every aspect of life is curated by a corporation... This is the city for the winners. The losers will be in homeless encampments outside the city gates.
The left's city of the future looks very different. It is a Star Trek world, where we can travel through space together and meet aliens. It is public libraries and free colleges, where all can come and learn without worrying about money. It is Mardis Gras in New Orleans, where everyone expresses their individuality through art and costume without any regard for profit or commerce. It is camping trips and cookouts, book clubs and street cafes. It is the theory that life is meant to be enjoyed, and that nobody should lack the basic ingredients for a decent existence. It is, above all, the conviction that we're here to help each other through this thing, whatever it is.
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Nathan J. Robinson (Why You Should Be a Socialist)
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Conceptual Games. Dr Nathan pondered the list on his desk-pad. (1) The catalogue of an exhibition of tropical diseases at the Wellcome Museum; (2) chemical and topographical analyses of a young woman’s excrement; (3) diagrams of female orifices: buccal, orbital, anal, urethral, some showing wound areas; (4) the results of a questionnaire in which a volunteer panel of parents were asked to devise ways of killing their own children; (5) an item entitled ‘self-disgust’ - someone’s morbid and hate-filled list of his faults. Dr Nathan inhaled carefully on his gold-tipped cigarette. Were these items in some conceptual game? To Catherine Austin, waiting as ever by the window, he said, ‘Should we warn Miss Novotny?’
Biomorphic Horror. With an effort, Dr Nathan looked away from Catherine Austin as she picked at her finger quicks. Unsure whether she was listening to him, he continued: ‘Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life - not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.’
Sink Speeds. During this period, after his return to Karen Novotny’s apartment, Travers was busy with the following projects: a cogent defence of the documentary films of Jacopetti; a contribution to a magazine symposium on the optimum auto-disaster; the preparation, at a former colleague’s invitation, of the forensic notes to the catalogue of an exhibition of imaginary genital organs. Immersed in these topics, Travers moved from art gallery to conference hall. Beside him, Karen Novotny seemed more and more isolated by these excursions. Advertisements of the film of her death had appeared in the movie magazines and on the walls of the underground stations. ‘Games, Karen,’ Travers reassured her. ‘Next they’ll have you filmed masturbating by a cripple in a wheel chair.
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J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)
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The superintendent of the new consolidated school, Emory Huyck, had been recommended for the job by his alma mater, Michigan State Agricultural College.1 He was born in 1894 in Butternut, Michigan, not far from Carson City, one of eleven children, all of whom would outlive him, as would both his parents, William and Mary. After graduating from high school at the top of his class, Emory briefly attended the Ferris Institute in Big Rapids, Michigan. Ferris had been founded in 1884 by future Michigan governor and US senator Woodbridge Nathan Ferris as an “industrial school” meant to provide both practical training and a basic liberal arts education “to all young men and women, regardless of their ages, regardless of their mental attainments, regardless of their present conditions, who desire to make themselves stronger and better.”2 In 1917, while teaching at a school in the Montcalm County village of Pierson, Emory registered for the draft. His registration card suggests that he was not merely willing but was keen to serve his country. To the question “Do you claim exemption from draft?” he answered with an emphatic “I do not,” rather than a simple “no,” as most young men did.3 Stationed at Camp Custer near Battle Creek during the war years, he served as a training officer. He would eventually be commissioned second lieutenant of cavalry in the Officers’ Reserve Corps.4
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Harold Schechter (Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer)
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Was my husband a doctor, or a patient?’ Dr Nathan nodded sagely, glancing over his fingertips at Catherine Austin. What had Travis seen in those time-filled eyes? ‘Mrs Travis, I’m not sure the question is valid any longer. These matters involve a relativity of a very different kind. What we are concerned with now are the implications - in particular, the complex of ideas and events represented by World War III. Not the political and military possibility, but the inner identity of such a notion. For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display, but for your husband it has become an expression of the failure of his psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and of his revolt against the present continuum of time and space. Dr Austin may disagree, but it seems to me that his intention is to start World War III, though not, of course, in the usual sense of the term. The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.
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J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)
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Miles probably should have figured that out for himself when he learned she was twenty-seven and an arts student – and hippies are not solitary creatures. They congregate in packs, and if you let one into your house you invite them all in. Kind of like termites, and almost as difficult to get rid of.
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Nathan Allen (The War On Horror: Tales From A Post-Zombie Society)