kevinreads

[kevinreads]

We treat racism in this country like it’s a style that America went through. Like flared legs and lava lamps. 'Oh, that crazy thing we did. We were hanging black people'. We treat it like a fad instead of a disease that eradicates millions of people. You’ve got to get it at a lab, and study it, and see its origins, and see what it’s immune to and what breaks it down.

Chris Rock

#chris rock #racism #USA #america #ferguson #quote

[kevinreads]

The reading stack on my coffee table upon returning from USA. Or as @slootherin says, “You know you have to come back one day. Stop buying stuff”. #amypoehlerismyqueen

#books #magazines #adventure time #amy poehler #kinfolk #monocle #reading

[kevinreads]

My favourite reviews are the ones that simply say, "This sucks." I enjoy it so much...I think because...it's the densest and most thoughtless expression and it annihilates...everything. All the effort I put into the show...decimated by some turd writing "this sucks" online. It's humbling, and I like the feeling of staying grounded.

Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward

#pendleton ward #adventure time #quote #inspiration #success #failure

[kevinreads]

"But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think— this will maybe sound weird— it’s like the corporate world’s full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I’ve had front-row seats for that horror show, I know academia’s no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood’s full of ghosts.” “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I quite—” “I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. Dan’s like that.” “You don’t think he likes his job, then.” “Correct,” she said, “but I don’t think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.” What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep? He was nodding, taking down as much as he could. “Do you think he’d describe himself as unhappy in his work?” “No,” Dahlia said, “because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?” “No, please elaborate.” “Okay, say you go into the break room,” she said, “and a couple people you like are there, say someone’s telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone’s so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don’t know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o’clock the day’s just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o’clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that’s what happens to your life.” “Right,” Clark said. He was filled in that moment with an inexpressible longing. The previous day he’d gone into the break room and spent five minutes laughing at a colleague’s impression of a Daily Show bit. “That’s what passes for a life, I should say. That’s what passes for happiness, for most people. Guys like Dan, they’re like sleepwalkers,” she said, “and nothing ever jolts them awake.”

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

#station eleven #quote #work #life #what even #post-apocalyptic

[kevinreads]

Future Perfect is a quarterly independent magazine for the socially and culturally engaged. 

The final product is carefully fashioned and lovingly curated from front page to last. Like an artist’s scrapbook, small, hand-drawn illustrations lead fancifully from story, to photograph, to striking header, to minimally organised type.

Check Broadsheet’s review here! Photos by Aaron Hughes.

#magazine #future perfect mag #FPmag #kinfolk #cereal mag #monocle #smith journal #frankie #australia #auspol #MRAs #indie mags #publishing #print #maps #tony abbott #clive palmer

[kevinreads]

Christ though, is a shard of glass in your gut. Christ is God crying I AM HERE, and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends and degrades you, here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God. To walk through the fog of God toward the clarity of Christ is difficult because of how 'ungodly' that clarity often turns out to be.

Christian Wyman, My Bright Abyss

#Christian Wyman #Christianity #My bright abyss #Quote #Reading #Books #Faith #God #Jesus Christ #Life #Mind blown

[kevinreads]

If you do not 'think' of God, in whatever way you find to do that, if God has no relation to your experience, if God is not IN your experience, then experience is always an end in itself, and always, I think, a dead end. Not only does experience open into nothing else, but that ulterior awareness, that spirit-cleansing whiff of the ultimate, never comes into the concrete details of existence either. You can certainly enjoy life like this; you can have a hell of a time. But I would argue that life remains MERELY something to be enjoyed, and that not only its true nature but also something within your true nature remains inert, unavailable, mute.

Christian Wyman, My Bright Abyss

#Christian Wyman #Quote #Reading #My bright abyss #God #Faith #Christianity #Existence #existentialism #Life #Inspiration

[kevinreads]

Life is short, we say, in one way or another, but in truth, because we cannot imagine our own death until it is thrust upon us, we live in a land where only other people die.

Christian Wyman, My Bright Abyss

#christian wyman #quote #death #my bright abyss

[kevinreads]

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses

George Orwell

#george orwell #quote

[kevinreads]

One cannot wander the world, and its bookcases, without seeing strange and morbid things.

Daniel Handler

#lemony snicket #daniel handler #quote

[kevinreads]

The mentality of the [English] left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power.

George Orwell

#george orwell #quote #reading #books #orwell #intelligentsia #politics

[kevinreads]

No Time to Read?

              Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat.  After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered.  Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice.  They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire forty miles.  It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life.  But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina.

              I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.

              Reportedly, the average American does have time to watch twenty-eight hours of television every week, or approximately four hours a day.  The average person, I’m told, reads at a rate of 250 words per minute.  So, based on these statistics, were the average American to spend those four hours a day with a book instead of watching television, he or she could, in a week, read:  the complete poems of T.S. Eliot; two plays by Thornton Wilder, including Our Town; the complete poems of Maya Angelou; Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury; The Great Gatsby; and The Book of Psalms.

              That’s all in one week.         

              But a week is a long time by today’s standards, when information is as available at the touch of a finger.  Information has become an industry, a commodity to be packaged, promoted and marketed incessantly.  The tools for “accessing” data grow ever more wondrous and ubiquitous and essential if we’re to keep in step, we’ve come to believe.  All hail the Web, the Internet, the Information Highway.

              We’re being sold the idea that information is learning, and we’re being sold a bill of goods.

              Information isn’t learning.  It isn’t wisdom.  It isn’t common sense necessarily.  It isn’t kindness.  Or good judgment.  Or imagination.  Or a sense of humor.  Or courage.  Information doesn’t tell us right from wrong.

              Knowing the area of the state of Connecticut in square miles, or the date on which the United Nations Charter was signed, or the jumping capacity of a flea may be useful, but it isn’t learning in itself.

              The greatest of all avenues to learning—to wisdom, adventure, pleasure, insight, to understanding human nature, understanding ourselves and our world and our place in it—is in reading books.

              Read for life, all your life.  Nothing ever invented provides such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book.

              Read for pleasure.  Read what you like, and all you like.  Read literally to your heart’s content.  Let one book lead you to another.  They nearly always do.

              Take up a great author, new or old, and read everything he or she has written.  Read about places you’ve never been.  Read biography, history.  Read books that changed history.  Tom Paine’s Common Sense; the autobiography of Frederick Douglass; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

              Read those books you know you’re supposed to have read and imagine as dreary.  A classic may be defined as a book that stays long in print, and a book stays long in print only because it is exceptional.  Why exclude the exceptional from your experience?

              Go back and read again the books written supposedly for children, especially if you think they are only for children.  My first choice would be The Wind in the Willows.  There’s much, very much, you can learn in the company of Toad, Rat and Mole.

              And when you read a book you love—a book you feel has enlarged the experience of being alive, a book that “lights the fire”—then spread the word.

              To carry a book with you wherever you go is old advice and good advice.  John Adams urged his son, John Quincy, to carry a volume of poetry. “You’ll never be alone,” he said, “with a poet in your pocket.”

 By David McCullough

#reading #books

[kevinreads]

I don't understand French, but if I could, I would write beautiful songs about horrible things... because it is said to be the language of love and romance... and if love didn't exist, there wouldn't be any horrible things. You must care to cry, love something in order to hate something... You must have a heart in order for it to be broken. Many people walk in a dream. They feel entitled to happiness and feel anger when it is not waiting for them. I know that the world owes me nothing, yet has given me a great deal. It is our own perception we get to bend and mold to our liking- once that is accomplished, the reality we once knew begins to change. My neighbor may be dark and gloomy, but I find it a perfect day to go outside. I can knock on his door, but that doesn't mean he will answer. And I will have to walk away, sad, from his little house where he sleeps and smokes and drinks all day, just to escape what he does not yet know. We find ourselves in little boxes watching little boxes. We see an edited version of human life, targeted on alienating us as individuals, to distract us from the seedy underbelly of politics and business. We are products of a Machiavellian society. Look at the pretty girl dancing- her hair is so shiny. I want my hair to be shiny. Look at the man with chiseled features- use the razor he is using. It will give you the kind of charm that woman crave. Women will want you. Men will adore you. You will be happy. You will be empty. Because it is not about the product, but the feeling they try to convey. And it is not for your benefit, it is for the benefit of the holders of the company. We must burn our little boxes. We must create dialogue. We must realize the importance of every moment. We must turn our boredom to gratitude. Use your hands, your thoughts, your hunger. These things are yours and yours alone.

The Sound Of Animals Fighting

#lyrics #quote #the sound of animals fighting #poem #boredom #machiavellian #spoken word #dreams #horrible #french #media #depression

[kevinreads]

To travel is to say goodbye.

Questions of Travel by Michelle de Krester.

#travel #quote #questions of travel #australian authors #michelle de krester

[kevinreads]

[kevinreads]

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

 Sylvia Plath (via fictionalheroine)

#sylvia plath

[kevinreads]

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that’s alive.

Milan Kundera, Immortality (via dan-nisa)

#milan kundera #quote #immortality