Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?”It’s like having an operation,’ said Treece. ‘You don’t know you’ve had it until long after it’s over.
Why is it that married people always say “Come in” when everything they do says “Get out”? They talk about their miseries and then ask you why you’re unmarried.
Well, it’s really no use our talking in the way we have been doing if the words we use mean something different to each of us…and nothing.
Treece quite seriously divided the world into writers, who led life as a conscious effort, and people, and people who didn’t; sometimes he preferred writers and sometimes he preferred people.
But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don’t recognize that, then that’s the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else’s fate to some extent.
You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can’t understand it.
This education we’re giving them is the tool of destruction, of course; that’s what makes it so painful. We’re showing them how to accomplish the ritual murder of ourselves.
Have a little sociological beano. As you said – in sociology one can do anything and call it work.
Well, really, how would you like to make love with someone who kept twittering about his pure mystic modality and wanted to stick flowers in your navel?
Madness, genius, originality – it’s all the same thing; it’s a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.
This was the sort of thing that happened to persons of this sort, sensitives, who fought the world and always, in the end, let it win, because there was a lot more taste to defeat than to victory.
Well, aren’t you just saying it’s better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?
Most beds aren’t as intimate as people think they are.
With sociology one can do anything and call it work.
On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space.