"Brenner also plans to recognize that the site was part of the Underground Railroad by erecting some small monuments."

"An extortion scheme, normally trapping a married man in a compromising position then blackmailing him."

“It’s like a Polaroid picture,” Mr. Lindsey said of his rough, spontaneous process. “I’m just trying to get the idea out before the inspiration is gone. Everything I do is motivated by the fear of running out of time.”

"Perhaps the ancients had other skills, metaphysical ones, which allowed them to see the unseeable and base a pictographic language on it."

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of writing and of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

He writes of avoiding his desk when inventing, avoiding the connotations of serious endeavor, of earning a living. “I wish instead,” he writes, “to be irresponsible, rash, associative, dreamy, impish, brainy, intuitive, and stupid.”

-Steven M. Johnson, inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner.

"What they [are] really doing here is telling the creation myth backwards as the symmetrical conclusion to the history of the world. Escaping exile in an alien dystopia, human beings storm paradise and, upon reentering, tear off their clothes without shame. God's judgment is overturned, nonsense is unlearned, a woman presents an apple to a snake, symbolizing the release of nature from the yoke of human will. Genders cease to be rigidly defined, each person becoming a complete unity of masculine and feminine characteristics. Finally, in only seven days time, the entirety of the old world is unmade, and on the last evening the lights of all cities, no longer powered by vast unsustainable infrastructures, blink out one by one."

-Greil Marcus, reviewing Expect Resistance.

I used to feel like this once

From an interview with Marnie Stern:

"That was when the biggest creative surge of my life happened, and nothing like that has ever happened since. My mind was open. Open to anything and everything, and that was the best two years of my whole life... I felt inspiration everywhere. Everywhere! Everything I heard, I was like, 'That was for me.' 'That was for me.' I was so positive and forward and yes, yes, yes. You know, and it was a great, great time... It was really terrific. That's when I got the idea that I could do anything. There were no boundaries or rules or limitations..."

2008

"It's the end of a fucked-up year. There's another one coming."

-Ian Mackaye, Embrace, 1987.

"As Goethe said: Everything's a metaphor."

-Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami, pg 107.