Posts Tagged ‘poetry’

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Ai Weiwei

April 28, 2014

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I am obsessed with
the iPhone—it is the North
Korea of life

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The Internet is
the spontaneous control
of free expression

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Twitter is like a
bird’s nest of corruption in
a tree of sorrow

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A society
that values contemplation
will suppress dissent

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The architecture
of state surveillance will crush
the United States

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A nation that has
no censorship will have no
art worth discussing

***************

A bureaucrat who
whispers has the power to
survive anything

***************

Ideology
without music is like a
poem without words

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Aquinas

April 20, 2014

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It is requisite
for the relaxation of
the mind to bear sin

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Because we cannot
know what God is, we live by
faith’s poetic myths

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Law: an ordinance
of reason made by him who
has care of evil

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A man cannot live
without the sorrow of his
carnal addictions

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Beware of the book
of knowledge; it is but a
material thing

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The active power
of the male seed tends to the
production of death

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Nothing on this earth
is prized more than a woman’s
playful endowments

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In order for a
war to be just, it requires
no explanation

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Life’s greatest pleasure
is the tedious pursuit
of true salvation

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Hemingway

April 3, 2014

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Profanity is
like drilling rock and blasting
life out with charges

***************

I have learned a great
deal from listening to fools,
failures and jackals

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Grace under pressure
is hunting drunk when you’ve shot
one bird all damn day

***************

A typewriter is
a weapon; a novel is
a war to the end

***************

Innocence marks the
permanent ruin of an
intelligent man

***************

Love is not for the
sweet butterfly; love is for
the bloody buzzard

***************

Politics is like
bullfighting: revoltingly
solemn and funny

***************

Suicide is the
shortest answer to any
problem except death

***************

Happiness is the
tendency to feel moral
when you’re immoral

***************

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Elaine Sturtevant

March 20, 2014

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Appropriation
is the understructure of
articulation

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Visibility
engenders hostility:
the frightening seen!

***************

Intuition is
the piss that waters the loss
of hierarchies

***************

Authorship is a
fraudulent readymade, a
vague imposition

***************

The cybernetic
excess of America
is retard funny

***************

Repetition is
the displacement of space with
continuity

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Deleuze and Foucault
are the big bang of mental
exhaustion—fuck them!

***************

Duchamp and Warhol
are a pervasive turn-on
with no threat of sex

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[Sturtevant is virtually unrepresented on quote sites. All text pooled from interviews with Peter Halley, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Bruce Hainley.]

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Damien Hirst

March 4, 2014

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I’d like to put the
Beatles in formaldehyde . . .
but it would be wrong

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I was brought up a
Catholic; I don’t have to
believe in England

***************

Love is like a sheep
collage, and you can always
get another sheep

***************

The goal of life is
immortality—I would
like to deviate

***************

Contemporary
art is ridiculous; so
is integrity

***************

Every crass artist
has to reinvent Pollock
without a canvas

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Hardcore poetics
is Philip Larkin writing
about an ashtray

***************

America is
a medicine cabinet
floating in vomit

***************

There is nothing more
morbid than advertising—
it’s a death funfair

***************

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Kristen Stewart

February 13, 2014

My Heart is a Pillar of Free Waffles

In my spare time this
month I read the black neon
clock’s universal

values, bomb blasts or
legs. I want to clean the bones.
Your body is an

abrasive device
that spray paints every known stone,
a man example,

clear guard of solar
windows, outdoor energy,
the pane result of

a hit taken for
all. And I will attack from
the freedom pole one

day, away from the
long bamboo handles that don’t
dig their own dust, don’t

match the language of
the demon language, melting
the currents of my

drunk eyes down to my
fingertips, seeing my drum
hands shake my branches.

[via Bulgarian-Greek-Hmong Daw-Latvian-Urdu, Bing translator]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/kristen-stewart-writes-worst-poem-of-all-time-9121635.html

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Andy Warhol

January 22, 2014

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Paintings and films are
really just like toilet seats
and shower curtains

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Artificial sex
is like eating peanuts: once
you start you can’t stop

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Pop Art will ball you,
but Abstract Expressionism
will come in your mouth

***************

The President is
always lying. So what? I
try not to notice.

***************

Love is Liz Taylor
having a Coke and a hot
dog in a limo

***************

Poor people won’t be
reincarnated—they have
no real incentive

***************

America has
a long tradition of great
refrigerators

***************

Mystery is the
mother of art, but money
is its weak husband

***************

The richest people
have no problems, no defects,
and they’re not boring

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There’s a difference
between plastic and empty:
empty is shiny

***************

http://thoughtcatalog.com/madison-moore/2013/05/the-41-greatest-andy-warhol-quotes/

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Ways of Looking (At a Blackbird)

January 6, 2014

I’ve been to three minds
and twenty snowy mountains
as a tree with three

blackbirds moves in the
autumn wind whirled with small mimes.
A man and woman:

I am one. A man
and woman and a blackbird:
I am one. I know

what you want: beauty
of inflection and beauty
of cues, the blackbird

whistling “Teddy”
and the long icicles of
l’ombra del merlo.

It’s gone back and forth,
a vidrio barbaro
mood described in the

shade, the thin cause of
indecipherable birds.
Haddam, know-golden,

noble, imagine
the blackbird walking the walk,
understand accents,

inescapable
women, clearer rhythms; I
know the blackbird is

involved. How do I
know? When the blackbird flew out
of sight he scored clubs

from a crew of green
pimps, the perforated edge
of a glass fear. The

float of time has been
modified. Fly, euphony!
The moving river

is looking at the
same blackbirds snowing, and the
thirteenth century

cried all afternoon
in Connecticut, evening
going among snow

as the blackbird sat
in snow shadow, cried in art
shadow of cedar.

[via Italian-Romanian-Swedish-Spanish-Slovak, Bing translator]

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F.T. Marinetti

December 23, 2013

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A museum is
a hospital of serpents,
a roaring death horse

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The fisticuffs of
my lips sing of metalized
love and injustice

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Patriotism is
individualism: a
steel temple of pride

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Open your heart to
unknown forces in order
to overcome art

***************

Indomitable
Woman, a rioting Moon,
imperishable

***************

The skyscraper is
the greedy locomotive
of time’s uselessness

***************

Poetry must be
as immortal as plastic,
an absurd ruin

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Poe

December 7, 2013

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The contemplation
of absolute darkness is
the horror of love

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The boundary which
divides art from life is the
fire of the insane

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Religion is the
madness of the soul and the
poetry of tears

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Death always has a
generous effect on a
woman’s eloquence

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Science is a crime,
and sanity a fraud, a
mind-atrocity

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Faith is a dream of
Christ with long intervals of
gossamer terror

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Nothing shall turn me
from an abhorrence of cats:
they are fear, evolved

***************

The irrational
imagination is pure
analytic truth

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Lao Tzu (Laozi)

October 31, 2013

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Treat the wicked with
patience and compassion—but
help them to perish

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Existence is a
small fish in the water of
faithful nonbeing

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The Way of Heaven
is a music unheard by
the conquering gods

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The attainment of
nothing creates contentment;
nothing is wisdom

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The good traveler
moves in the shadow of the
paradoxical

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The greatest joy is
the courage to know that there
is no greatest joy

***************

When I let go of
what I am, my fingers touch
the source of my self

***************

A leader is a
goose. A scholar is an ox.
A sage is an ant.

***************

Death is a series
of small desires—it is the
flower of nature

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Hegel

October 21, 2013

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The spoken word is
the immediate truth of
animal knowledge

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Nature is the great
despoiler of beauty, an
uncivilized jest

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The scholar sees the
value in everything but
corporeal thought

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The dialectic
is pure light and pure darkness
in perfect conflict

***************

When liberty is
mentioned, universal rights
mean nothing at all

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Without shoes that fit,
little will be accomplished
in the real world

***************

Man is too divine
for Providence; he is the
total creation

***************

The history of
Germany depends on the
judgment of heroes

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Consciousness is the
external reality
of intuition

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The mere idea
of government rests solely
on servants’ logic

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Francis Picabia

October 6, 2013

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My ass always has
need of God; my head always
has need of Satan

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The essence of a
man is his shirt and trousers—
naked, he’s nothing

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All pleasure is pain
disguised as misery and
bald indifference

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The unaesthetic
is as indispensable
as the family

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There are only two
categories: life and death.
They bore everyone.

***************

Knowledge is like art—
it lasts only five minutes,
useless and tiring

***************

Concubinage is
marriage that takes liberties
with monotony

***************

Paradise is the
blue music of immortal,
bearable failure

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Vincent van Gogh

September 24, 2013

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Frightening dreams are
silenced only by the blue
of Man’s suffering

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If you hear a voice
within you, disregard it
with your inmost strength

***************

If you don’t paint the
stars, your soul is forsaken,
a wisp of warm smoke

***************

I am still far from
God, lost, a churchwarden in
the dirtiest hut

***************

Life is a yellow
storm on an orange sea—a
fantasy of love

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My heart is the slave
of conscience without courage—
small deeds, small mistakes

***************

Religion is a
terrible certainty of
high-minded reason

***************

My faith is a poor
fisherman who is always
remaining ashore

***************

Fallibility
and discouragement fire the
imagination

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Kenneth Goldsmith #2

August 22, 2013

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The news is abused—
cold code strained through inverted
subjectivity

***************

Assassination
is the struggle to find words
that describe genius

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The sufficiency
of average-sized eyes is
a harrowing joke

***************

Florida is an
agony of moribund
class repetition

***************

Plagiarism is the
spectacle emanating
from silent mourning

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A soft text wrapped in
shock iconizes the breasts
of cultural whim

***************

The gargantuan
problem of discourse is the
horror of language

***************

Conceptualism:
Minimalism plus Michael
Jackson’s memories

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[Goldsmith is virtually unrepresented on quote sites. All text pooled from his interview with Christopher Higgs in the Paris Review, 2013]

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Kenneth Goldsmith #1

July 27, 2013

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Brion Gysin is
the horizontal axis
of the avant-garde

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Concrete poetry’s
shelf life is about a week—
the same as gossip

***************

The New York Times is
Vogue with rabbinical text
and raw editing

***************

Writing is fifty
years behind fashion, but it’s
gorgeously simple

***************

Cooperative
mimesis is the flatness
of community

***************

The parameters
of the abstract canon are
ennui’s storage bins

***************

The normative speech
of idiosyncratic
art is radiance

***************

Cage, Ginsberg, Warhol
and Whitman: grubby merchants
all, plain and greedy

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[Goldsmith is virtually unrepresented on quote sites. All text pooled from his interview with Marjorie Perloff in Jacket magazine, 2003]

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