seventies sesame st
Kurt Vonnegut, on Communism, 2005
“About Stalin’s shuttered churches, and those in China today: Such suppression of religion was supposedly justified by Karl Marx’s statement that ‘religion is the opium of the people.’ Marx said that back in 1844, when opium and opium derivatives were the only effective painkillers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they had given him. He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic or social distress. It was a casual truism, not a dictum…
Stalin was happy to take Marx’s truism as a decree, and Chinese tyrants as well, since it seemingly empowered them to put preachers out of business who might speak ill of them or their goals.
The statement has also entitled many in this country to say that socialists are antireligion, are anti-God, and therefore absolutely loathsome.”
Dave Beckerman
(Source: , via cold-sweats)
From “Speak, Memory,” Vladimir Nabokov, 1947
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)…Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much. I rebel against this state of affairs.”
3 weeks ago - 
5
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still no sleep. nyquil, baby, don’t promise wut u can’t deliver.
“I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that someone should become a person like other people.”
Joan Didion on what she missed about California while in New York, 2006
“Rivers. I was living on the East Side, and on the weekend I’d walk over to the Hudson and then I’d walk back to the East River. I kept thinking, All right, they are rivers, but they aren’t California rivers. I really missed California rivers. Also the sun going down in the West. That’s one of the big advantages to Columbia-Presbyterian hospital—you can see the sunset. There’s always something missing about late afternoon to me on the East Coast. Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. Here it just gets dark.”
Kurt Vonnegut, on Marriage, in, “God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian,” 1999
Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.
What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.
Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.
A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.
But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.
When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this:
“You are not enough people!”
