"By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longeer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with theire artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material is more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers alll signs of the real and short-circuits all of its vicissitudes."
“...she asked me which part of the broom was more elemental, more fundamental, in my opinion, the bristles or the handle. The bristles or the handle. And I hemmed and hawed, and she swept more and more violently, and I got nervous, and finally when I said I supposed the bristles, because you could after a fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding on to the bristles, but couldn’t sweep with just the handle, she tackled me, and knocked me out of my chair, and yelled into my ear something like, ’Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with the broom, isn’t it? It’s because of what you want the broom for, isn’t it?’ Et cetera. And that if what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen window, and a crowd of the domestics gathered; but that if we wanted the broom to sweep with, see for example the broken glass, sweep sweep, the bristles were the thing’s essence. No? What now, then? With pencils? No matter. Meaning as fundamentalness. Fundamentalness as use. Meaning as use. Meaning as fundamentalness…"
And then Gramma Lenore noticed that one component of the facility that this method couldn’t be applied to was the patients themselves, because they had no function, no use, weren’t good for anything at all...She told me this drove her up the wall...So Gramma Lenore perceived loss of identity without function. She wanted to be useful, she said to me”.
“Praise to be the stars that implode. A new freedom opens up within them: annulled from space, exonerated from time, existing at last, for themselves alone and no longer in relation to all the rest, perhaps only they can be sure they really exist.”
“...It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”
“In the never ending apprenticeship of scientific training, the thought activity of greatest importance is the pulling together into a whole - the synthesis - of bits and fragments of experience, which the thinker had previously known as separate”.
"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absured, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else...Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."
“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
“Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?...If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.”
“Aestheticism asks you to view every object as you would a work of art...You experience a work of art. You go into it. Not just as a calm onlooker...you feel or taste everything; you lust for it, let it overwhelm you, amplify it to titillate or satisfy or disgust you; you mentally twist the canvas to wring it dry.
The discipline is to learn to see the rest of the world in just that way…”Look more closely” is the basic answer of the aesthete to any failure of experience: “For anything to become interesting you simply have to look at it for a long time”, wrote Flaubert.
Life becomes the scene of total, never-ending experience, as long as the aesthete can muster the intensity to regard it this way…”External reality has to enter into us, almost enough to make us cry out, if we are to represent it properly”. Flaubert became a representer because he wished to live.
Perfectionism, in contrast, puts the self before everything. It charges the self with weighing and choosing every behaviour and every aspect of its way of living...You learn to consider the people and things of the world - a farmer, a stockbroker, your friend or enemy, but also any conversation, or book, or even a pond or tree - as if each might suggest an “example” of a way you, too, could be.
In becoming an example, each thing invites you to measure and change yourself - and therefore change your life. Perfection makes you weigh every experience against the state of your self and accept or refuse it.”
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
“There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.”
“We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins.
“Even the farthest seers can't bend their gaze beyond their era's horizon of possibility, but the horizon shifts with each incremental revolution as the human mind peers outward to take in nature, then turns inward to question its own givens. We sieve the world through the mesh of these certitudes, tautened by nature and culture, but every once in a while—whether by accident or conscious effort-the wire loosens and the kernel of revolution slips through.”
"I think I have walked into some wood, and lost sight of my words in the dimness. I thought I knew what words were for and how to use them. But I thought a lot of things and suddenly, now, in the last year perhaps, none of them seem to matter at all. Where did my strong political views go? I used to know how the world ought to work. I used to know what I wanted to say, to think, to write. Now I don’t know why I would have ever thought that”.
“There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play”.
“A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future...This is the finite player in the mode of seriousness with its dread of unpredictable consequence. Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases.”
“No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others.”