Crude Quotes

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

You sick piece of shit," Adam says to him, his voice low, measured. "Such unfortunate language." Warner shakes his head. "Only those who cannot express themselves intelligently would resort to such crude substitutions in vocabulary.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else...

There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.

And how have I lived? Frankly and openly, though crudely. I have not been afraid of life. I have not shrunk from it. I have taken it for what it was at its own valuation. And I have not been ashamed of it. Just as it was, it was mine.

Are you kidding? That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog.

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife. [The New York Times interview, 2000]

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

Love is like a booger, you pick and pick at it. Then when you get it you wonder how to get rid of it.

A cold wind swept across the patio, causing me to shiver. Noah shrugged off his black leather jacket and tossed it around my shoulders. "How are you going to tutor me if you get fucking pneumonia?" I cocked an eyebrow. What an odd combination of romantic gesture and horribly crude wording.

Fuck, this is gonna piss you off and then you aren’t gonna let me stick my dick in you,” he muttered. “Do you have to be so crude?” I snapped. “Have you met me?” “Who says I’d let you do it anyway?” “Babe,” he replied in a low, rough voice, raising his eyebrow at me.

Fuck, this is gonna piss you off and then you aren’t gonna let me stick my dick in you,” he muttered. “Do you have to be so crude?” I snapped. “Have you met me?

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.

You’re crude.” "I’m crude?” "You just offered to make me your whore.” "To be the Consort of a Master vampire is an honor, Initiate, not an insult.” "It’s an insult to me. I’m not going to be your—anyone’s—sexual outlet. When that . . . happens for me, when I meet him, I want partnership. Love. You don’t trust me enough for the former, and I’m not even sure you’re capable of the latter.

Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one.

Modesty answers not the crude how of femininity, but the beautiful why.

Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.

Such unfortunate language. Only those who cannot express themselves intelligently would resort to such crude substitutions in vocabulary.

A crude meal, no doubt, but the best of all sauces is hunger.

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem".

Control yourself, she told herself forcibly. Become someone who can deal with this. She took a deep breath and let herself become someone else. An imitation of herself who was calm, even in a situation like this. It was a crude forgery, just a trick of the mind, but it worked.

Forgive me, I’m being a bit crude and rude about this, but I can’t make the reality prettier than it is: sad, grim, and funny all at once.

He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft, to effeminate. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action.

If you can't love crudeness, how can you truly love mankind?

The result is ... that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.

The stems stood tall and straight, one series arranged in a single line, the other in a crudely shaped heart, the final one in the shape of the letter U. I love you.

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.

Some day perhaps our time will be known as the age of irony. Not the witty irony of the eighteenth century, but the stupid or malignant irony of a crude age of technological progress and cultural regression.

A smug, satisfied grin stretched Apollo's lips. "I took Hermes' helmet, melted the mother down, and here you go. An invisibility charm just for you." Apollo dropped the necklace into my palm. It was a reddish-gold color, and a crudely shaped wing was etched into it. "Ha," I said. "It's like Harry Potter and the invisibility cloak." Everyone stared at me.

The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable.

It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.

He embraced me, and said into my ear, 'I'm going to fuck the shit out of you.' I lost my breath. It was crude, it was unexpected, and it set me on fucking fire.

I am made, crudely, for success.

I hate the thought that I'm just some kind of Russian nesting doll with the big outside and inevitably, rattling around under all the layers, a crude little peg with a face is the truth of me.

We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton's intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence

How's your orange juice, Anna? Does it have a touch of lime?” The glass paused at my lips as I processed his innuendo, and I took a second to make sure my embarrassment stayed hidden inside. I let the drink swish over my tongue a moment before swallowing and answering. “Actually it's a little sour,” I said, and he laughed. “That's a shame.” He picked up a green pear from his plate and bit into it, licking juice that dripped down his thumb. My cheeks warmed as I set down my glass. “Okay, now you're just being crude,” I said. He grinned with lazy satisfaction.

This is the mythosphere. It's made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you can see, it's constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite crude and dangerous. They've hardened off, you see.

The man was rude, crude, and inappropriate. I was taken with him the moment I walked in the door, and I knew the first moment I saw him that it was going to be raw, it was going to be ugly, and I was going to enjoy every damn minute of it.

She would be a sparkling accent on his arm. She speaks flawless French and Italian, and has a limitless supply of charm when she wishes to dispense it. And'd she'll use him. She'll take, take more. If it was necessary, or if she simply had the whim, she'd toss him to the wolves to see who'd win." He finished the whiskey. "You, Lieutenant, are often crude, you are certainly rude, and have very little sense of how to be the wife--in public--of a man in Roarke's position. And you would do anything, no matter what the personal risk, to keep him from harm. She will never love him. You will never do anything but.

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous." (Great Thought, February 19, 1938)

Ela did you just fart? Because you just blew me away.

Fear and shame are the backbone of my self-control. They are my source of inspiration, my insurance against becoming entirely unacceptable. They help me do the right thing. And I am terrified of what I would be without them. Because I suspect that, left to my own devices, I would completely lose control of my life. I'm still hoping that perhaps someday I'll learn how to use willpower like a real person, but until that very unlikely day, I will confidently battle toward adequacy, wielding my crude skill set of fear and shame.

Gentle souls! You play your love on the violin. The crude ones play it on the drums violently. But can you turn yourselves inside out, like me And become just two lips entirely?

Gentlemen don’t ask women impertinent questions about delicate subjects…… And they never, ever use crude expressions in mixed company. Not unless they’re ready to face the consequences.

You see I've been taking these tests to tell when I'm ovulating and when I'm mostfertile. And well...it's now." "Oh, so you came up here for a fuck?" Emma cringed. "Do you always have to be so crude?" He chuckled. "I'm sorry. Would you prefer I call it an afternoon delight?" he teased.

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still - at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) - it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.

The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

If through no fault of his own the hero is crushed by a bulldozer in Act II, we are not impressed. Even though life is often like this—the absconding cashier on his way to Nicaragua is killed in a collision at the airport, the prominent statesman dies of a stroke in the midst of the negotiations he has spent years to bring about, the young lovers are drowned in a boating accident the day before their marriage—such events, the warp and woof of everyday life, seem irrelevant, meaningless. They are crude, undigested, unpurged bits of reality—to draw a metaphor from the late J. Edgar Hoover, they are “raw files.” But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero’s personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him.

A shade of sorrow passed over Taliesin's face. 'There are those,' he said gently, 'who must first learn loss, despair, and grief. Of all paths to wisdom, this is the cruelest and longest. Are you one who must follow such a way? This even I cannot know. If you are, take heart nonetheless. Those who reach the end do more than gain wisdom. As rough wool becomes cloth, and crude clay a vessel, so do they change and fashion wisdom for others, and what they give back is greater than what they won.

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

I almost wish that I could replace their hideous flok dolls, as a gesture of my gratitude. Could you, perhaps, have one of the local women fashion a crude poppet out of, say, a wooden spool and some scraps of wool? Nothing fancy. Aesthetic standars for this particular collection were not high, believe me. "Ugly" and "ill-crafted" seem to be part of the key criteria.

First, we think all truth is beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain is good because it is the most profound of all human feelings. We think sex is beautiful even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain above prettiness and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety without making moral judgments. We think the prostitute is as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet minister, for they all fit into the pattern of nature and are woven into the design of life!

I mean, I'm just tired of being wrong all the time just because I'm a guy. I mean how many times can everybody tell you that you're the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy. I mean a male, chauvinist pig isn't born, hes made, and more and more of them are being made by women. After long enough you just roll over and accept the fact that you're a sexist, bigoted, insensitive, crude, cretinist cretin. Women are right. You're wrong. You get used to the idea. You live down to expectations. Even if the shoe doesn't fit, you'll shrink to fill it. I mean, in a world without god aren't mothers the new god? The last sacred unassailable position. Isn't motherhood the last perfect magical miracle? But a miracle that isn't possible for men, and maybe men say they're glad not to give birth, all the pain and blood, but really that's just so much sour grapes. For sure, men can't do anything near as incredible. Upper body strength, abstract thought, phalluses - any advantage men appear to have are pretty token. You can't even hammer a nail with a phallus. Women are already born so far ahead ability - wise. The day a men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.

Let me get straight on this. You don’t want to be the girl to wear out your welcome, but you’ll be the girl who lets him wear out your vagina?” She slaps my arm in the dark. “That’s just crude, Laurie.” She giggles. “But oh so true. He did wear it out like a champ.

[Science] works! Planes fly. Cars drive. Computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base the design of planes on science, they fly. If you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works... bitches.

Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

His dark blue shirt was plastered to his chest, covered with werewolf goop and tears. "Now we both need a bath," I said. "That can be arranged." "Please, Jean-Claude, no sexual innuendo until after I'm clean." "Of course, MA PETITE. It was crude of me tonight. My apologies." I stared at him. He was being far too nice. Jean-Claude was a lot of things, but nice wasn't one of them. "If you're up to something, I don't want to know about it. I can't handle any deep, dark plots tonight, okay?" He smiled and gave a low, sweeping bow, never taking his eyes off me. The way you bow on the judo mat when you're afraid the person may pound you if you look away. I shook my head. He WAS up to something. Nice to know that not everyone had suddenly become something else. One thing I could always depend on what Jean-Claude. Pain in the ass that he was, he always seemed to be there. Dependable in his own twisted way. Jean-Claude dependable? I must have been more tired than I thought.

the phantom of the man-who-would-understand, the lost brother, the twin --- for him did we leave our mothers, deny our sisters, over and over? did we invent him, conjure him over the charring log, nights, late, in the snowbound cabin did we dream or scry his face in the liquid embers, the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us? It was never the rapist: it was the brother, lost, the comrade/twin whose palm would bear a lifeline like our own: decisive, arrowy, forked-lightning of insatiate desire It was never the crude pestle, the blind ramrod we were after: merely a fellow-creature with natural resources equal to our own.

Perhaps I am his hope. But then she is his present. And if she is his present, I am not his present. Therefore, I am not, and I wonder why no-one has noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury me. For I am utterly collapsed. I lounge with glazed eyes, or weep tears of sheer weakness. All people seem criminally irrelevant. I ignore everyone and everything, and, if crossed or interrupted in my decay, hate. Nature is only the irking weather and flowers crude reminders of stale states of being.

That night, the Raka conspirators had plenty of news to report, particularly Ochobu. Aly had not known that the mages of the Chain had been laboring to eliminate any mages who had worked magic on the Crown’s behalf. So far they had killed seven of the most powerful. Chelaol would call this count of the dead another ‘good start,’ Aly thought grimly. This crude business of counting up lives taken struck her as a bad idea. It took the horror from death. When Ochobu named four mages on Lombyn who had had been killed in the streets of their towns, it had been about numbers, not lives. Maybe this is how you become a Rittevon, she thought. You get used to the dead being described as numbers, not fathers or daughters or grandparents. She turned to Dove when Ochobu finished, 'don’t ever be like this,' she urged. 'don’t think that it doesn’t matter if you only hear of murder as a number. If you keep it at a distance.

I always write a draft version of the novel in which I try to develop, not the story, not the plot, but the possibilities of the plot. I write without thinking much, trying to overcome all kinds of self-criticism, without stopping, without giving any consideration to the style or structure of the novel, only putting down on paper everything that can be used as raw material, very crude material for later development in the story.

Oh, poor me, I have to make out with a hot superstar. Women fawn over me wherever I go. I have fucktastic hair and an eight pack. Boo-hoo.” Twisting his lips in a look of contempt, he made an obscene gesture over his privates. I couldn’t help the small smile that crept onto my face. He was rude and crude and said things I didn’t want to hear sometimes, but somehow Griffin was also amusing in a comforting sort of way, and I actually did feel better. Lord, help me.

Passion and courtesy are two polar opposite traits that serve to balance each other into a full-blooded whole. Without socialization, passion is a crude barbarian, and without passion, the elegant and polite are dead. Allow both passion and courtesy into your life in equal measure, and be complete.

A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We're living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe it!

You’re a prickly, stubborn, spirited woman.” “Don’t forget crude, rude, and vulgar.” “Only when it suits you. You’re sly when occasion calls for it, direct to the point of forgetting tact even exists, sarcastic, fierce, I did mention stubborn, didn’t I?” “Yes,” she said dryly. “You’re also smart, kind, gentle, beautiful, and always cling to your personal integrity, even when it’s in your best interests to abandon it.” A little warm feeling spread through her chest, and even her natural suspicion that he was lying couldn’t quite extinguish it. Where was he going with this? “You’re also quite funny,” he said. “Oh, I amuse you?” He gave her one of his devastating, slightly wicked smiles. “You have no idea.” Arrogant ass. “And all of that means what?” “Just that I mean to have you.” She frowned at him. “I mean to have you, Rose, you and all of your thorns. I’m a disagreeable and stubborn bastard, but I’m not a fool. You didn’t really expect me to pass you up, did you?

Each woman is like an instrument, waiting to be learned, loved, and finely played, to have at last her own true music made. Some might take offense at this way of seeing things, not understanding how a trouper views his music. They might think I degrade women. They might consider me callous, or boorish, or crude. But those people do not understand love, or music, or me.

No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people. And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth. The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it.

I was eleven when my father left, so neither of us really knew our fathers. I’d met mine of course, but then I only knew my dad as a child knows a parent, as a sort of crude outline filled in with one or two colors. I’d never seen my father scared or cry. I’d never heard him admit to any wrongdoing. I have no idea what he dreamed of. And once I’d seen a smile pinned to one cheek and darkness to the other when my mum had yelled at him. Now he was gone, and I was left with just an impression—one of male warmth, big arms, and loud laughter.

A crude way to put the whole thing is that our presence culture is, both develeopmentally and historically, adolescent. And since adolescence is acknowledged to be the single most stressful and frightening period of human development – the stage when adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitation (taxes, death) and when we yearn inside for a return to the same childish oblivion we pretend to scorn – it’s not difficult to see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and entertainment whose primary function is escape, i. e. fantasy, adrenaline, spectacle, romance, etc.

Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales; woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings; mysterious life filled the night; with new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think "scientifically" that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him. And he fears to believe this, because it would be so terrible if it proved to be false, and nothing would remain but prison and the expectation of execution.

It is easier to understand if you think of it in terms of music. Sometimes a man enjoys a symphony. Elsetimes he finds a jig more suited to his taste. The same holds true for lovemaking. One type is suited to the deep cushions of a twilight forest glade. Another comes quite naturally tangled in the sheets of narrow beds upstairs in inns. Each woman is like an instrument, waiting to be learned, loved, and finely played, to have at last her own true music made. Some might take offense at this way of seeing things, not understanding how a trouper views his music. They might think I degrade women. They might consider me callous, or boorish, or crude. But those people do not understand love, or music, or me.

Because let's talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I'm not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force.

When you meet young people, inspire them. When you meet old people, honor them. When you meet wise people, study them. When you meet foolish people, avoid them. When you meet humble people, treasure them. When you meet arrogant people, ignore them. When you meet gracious people, emulate them. When you meet crude people, disregard them. When you meet brave people, support them. When you meet cowardly people, encourage them. When you meet strong people, follow them. When you meet weak people, toughen them. When you meet kind people, esteem them. When you meet cruel people, oppose them. When you meet virtuous people, reward them. When you meet evil people, evade them.

The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom. The gotta, as in: “I know I should be starting supper now — he’ll be mad if it’s TV dinners again — but I gotta see how this ends.” I gotta know will she live. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend’s screwing her husband. The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record — don’t stop til you get enough.

Then I guess the rest of my life will be resigned to doggy style sex." The words were out of my mouth before I could think about them. "I mean however long...when we're...that wasn't a fucking proposal." "Okay." "Don't smile that. Smugness doesn't become you." "Okay." "Scoot the fuck over. You're hogging the bed." Austin and Peter. :')

Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. (Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud's ego, id, and superego.)

Dear Fellow Human Being, You are born wild, You do not deserve to be tamed! Tell yourself, You do not deserve this! All those toxic words you have to listen from people, All those fears they try to pin on your mind, All those giggles they aim at your dreams, All those judgmental stares inspecting your individuality, All those fingers pointing towards your crude character, All those shackles that tie your feet to social expectations, All those cages that do not let your imagination fly free, Listen deeply, you do not deserve any of it. My dear fellow human, you do not deserve this hostility. You are born wild, You do not deserve to be tamed!

As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.

Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life. But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it.

[Artemis] returned to the aft bay for Mulch's version of a briefing. The dwarf had drawn a crude diagram on a backlit wall panel. In fairness, there were more artistic chimpanzees. And less pungent ones. Mulch was using a carrot as a pointer, or more accurately, several carrots. Dwarfs liked carrots. 'This is Koboi Labs,' He mumbled around a mouthful of vegetable. 'That?' exclaimed Root. 'I realize, Julius, that it is not an accurate schematic.' The Commander exploded from his chair. 'An accurate schematic? It's a rectangle for heaven's sake!' Mulch was unperturbed. 'That's not important. This is the important bit.' 'That wobbly line?' 'It's a fissure,' pouted the dwarf. 'Anybody can see that.' 'Anybody in kindergarten maybe. So it's a fissure, so what?' 'This is the clever bit. Y'see that fissure is not usually there.' Root began strangling the air again. Something he was doing more and more lately.

Obedient to no man, dependent only on weather and season, without a goal before them or a roof above them, owning nothing, open to every whim of fate, the homeless wanderers lead their childlike, brave, shabby existence. They are the sons of Adam, who was driven out of Paradise; the brothers of the animals, of innocence. Out of heaven's hand they accept what is given them from moment to moment: sun, rain, fog, snow, warmth, cold, comfort, and hardship; time does not exist for them and neither does history, or ambition, or that bizarre idol called progress and evolution, in which houseowners believe so desperately. A wayfarer may be delicate or crude, artful or awkward, brave or cowardly—he is always a child at heart, living in the first day of creation, before the beginning of the history of the world, his life always guided by a few simple instincts and needs. He may be intelligent or stupid; he may be deeply aware of the fleeting fragility of all living things, of how pettily and fearfully each living creature carries its bit of warm blood through the glaciers of cosmic space, or he may merely follow the commands of his poor stomach with childlike greed—he is always the opponent, the deadly enemy of the established proprietor, who hates him, despises him, or fears him, because he does not wish to be reminded that all existence is transitory, that life is constantly wilting, that merciless icy death fills the cosmos all around.

This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil! This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. When Christianity clothed it in the teachings of the Church Fathers, it began to fade; its kernel became a husk. It remains potent only while it is dumb and senseless, hidden in the living darkness of the human heart – before it becomes a tool or commodity in the hands of preachers, before its crude ore is forged into the gilt coins of holiness. It is as simple as life itself. Even the teachings of Jesus deprived it of its strength. But, as I lost faith in good, I began to lose faith even in kindness. It seemed as beautiful and powerless as dew. What use was it if it was not contagious? How can one make a power of it without losing it, without turning it into a husk as the Church did? Kindness is powerful only while it is powerless. If Man tries to give it power, it dims, fades away, loses itself, vanishes.

The calcium in your bones came from a star. We are all made from recycled bits and pieces of the universe. This matters because origins matter. For example, if you were born to a reigning monarch but kidnapped by the black market baby underground shortly after birth and sent to America where you were raised by common, unremarkable people from Ohio, and when you were in your thirties working as a humble UPS driver, dignitaries landed their helicopter on the roof of your crummy apartment building and informed you of their thirty-plus year search for you, His Royal Highness, the course of your life might change. You know? Our familial genetic origins -medical histories- inform us of medical conditions which exist in our families and when we know about these specific conditions, we can sometimes take certain actions to prevent them. Which is why I think it’s important to consider that billions of years before we were students and mothers and dog trainers and priests, we were particles that would form into star after star after star until forever passed, and instead of a star what formed was life; simplistic, crude, miraculous. And after another infinity, there we were. And this is why for you, anything is possible. Because you are made out of everything.

in heavenly realms of hellas dwelt two very different sons of zeus: one, handsome strong and born to dare --a fighter to his eyelashes-- the other,cunning ugly lame; but as you'll shortly comprehend a marvellous artificer now Ugly was the husband of (as happens every now and then upon a merely human plane) someone completely beautiful; and Beautiful,who(truth to sing) could never quite tell right from wrong, took brother Fearless by the eyes and did the deed of joy with him then Cunning forged a web so subtle air is comparatively crude; an indestructible occult supersnare of resistless metal: and(stealing toward the blissful pair) skilfully wafted over them- selves this implacable unthing next,our illustrious scientist petitions the celestial host to scrutinize his handiwork: they(summoned by that savage yell from shining realms of regions dark) laugh long at Beautiful and Brave --wildly who rage,vainly who strive; and being finally released flee one another like the pest thus did immortal jealousy quell divine generosity, thus reason vanquished instinct and matter became the slave of mind; thus virtue triumphed over vice and beauty bowed to ugliness and logic thwarted life:and thus-- but look around you,friends and foes my tragic tale concludes herewith: soldier,beware of mrs smith

Now consider the tortoise and the eagle. The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat. And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger. And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap… And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle. And then the eagle lets go. And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’s much better eating on practically anything else. It’s simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises. But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection. One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

Poshlust,” or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as “the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue” (as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name—that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost’s favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouvés in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots—all of it as corny in its own right as the academic “September Morns” and “Florentine Flowergirls” of half a century ago. The list is long, and, of course, everybody has his bête noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the snack served by an obsequious wench to a young couple—she eyeing ecstatically the cucumber canapé, he admiring wistfully the hostess. And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range.

Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him, and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the state of his own mind--or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see. Encourage this. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties of directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate the most useful human characteristics, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office. 2. It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very 'spiritual', that is is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rhuematism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards are her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother--the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment's notice from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's soul to beating or insulting the real wife or son without any qualm. 3. When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face whice are almost unedurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother's eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy--if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbablity of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this is easily managed.

The realms of dating, marriage, and sex are all marketplaces, and we are the products. Some may bristle at the idea of people as products on a marketplace, but this is an incredibly prevalent dynamic. Consider the labor marketplace, where people are also the product. Just as in the labor marketplace, one party makes an offer to another, and based on the terms of this offer, the other person can choose to accept it or walk. What makes the dating market so interesting is that the products we are marketing, selling, buying, and exchanging are essentially our identities and lives. As with all marketplaces, every item in stock has a value, and that value is determined by its desirability. However, the desirability of a product isn’t a fixed thing—the desirability of umbrellas increases in areas where it is currently raining while the desirability of a specific drug may increase to a specific individual if it can cure an illness their child has, even if its wider desirability on the market has not changed. In the world of dating, the two types of desirability we care about most are: - Aggregate Desirability: What the average demand within an open marketplace would be for a relationship with a particular person. - Individual Desirability: What the desirability of a relationship with an individual is from the perspective of a specific other individual. Imagine you are at a fish market and deciding whether or not to buy a specific fish: - Aggregate desirability = The fish’s market price that day - Individual desirability = What you are willing to pay for the fish Aggregate desirability is something our society enthusiastically emphasizes, with concepts like “leagues.” Whether these are revealed through crude statements like, “that guy's an 8,” or more politically correct comments such as, “I believe she may be out of your league,” there is a tacit acknowledgment by society that every individual has an aggregate value on the public dating market, and that value can be judged at a glance. When what we have to trade on the dating market is often ourselves, that means that on average, we are going to end up in relationships with people with an aggregate value roughly equal to our own (i.e., individuals “within our league”). Statistically speaking, leagues are a real phenomenon that affects dating patterns. Using data from dating websites, the University of Michigan found that when you sort online daters by desirability, they seem to know “their place.” People on online dating sites almost never send a message to someone less desirable than them, and on average they reach out to prospects only 25% more desirable than themselves. The great thing about these markets is how often the average desirability of a person to others is wildly different than their desirability to you. This gives you the opportunity to play arbitrage with traits that other people don’t like, but you either like or don’t mind. For example, while society may prefer women who are not overweight, a specific individual within the marketplace may prefer obese women, or even more interestingly may have no preference. If a guy doesn’t care whether his partner is slim or obese, then he should specifically target obese women, as obesity lowers desirability on the open marketplace, but not from his perspective, giving him access to women who are of higher value to him than those he could secure within an open market.

The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered. Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague." He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors. His face was contorted with anguish, one could see the perspiration dampening his hair. His eyes dilated, his muscles became cramped, his fingers struggled to retain their flexibility. He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever, the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own crucifixion. At first people gasped. And then they began to laugh. Everyone was laughing! They hissed. Then, one by one, they began to leave, noisily, talking, protesting. They banged the door as they left. The only ones who did not move were Allendy, his wife, the Lalous, Marguerite. More protestations. More jeering. But Artaud went on, until the last gasp. And stayed on the floor. Then when the hall had emptied of all but his small group of friends, he walked straight up to me and kissed my hand. He asked me to go to the cafe with him.