Quote of the day

[Magical Realist]

“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

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[Magical Realist]

“I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.”
—Aleister Crowley

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[Magical Realist]

“Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.”
― Ryokan

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[Magical Realist]

"Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion - painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless."
-Chuck Palahniuk

[Magical Realist]

"What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."
Crowfoot

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[Magical Realist]

"What is this thing called life? I believe
That the earth and the stars too, and the whole
glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,
Only we do not call it so--I speak of the life
That oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-
Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy
Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration,
hatred and terror: how do these things grow
From a chemical reaction?"
-- Robinson Jeffers

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[Syne]

“I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions

“When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.”
― William James

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
― Neil Peart

[Magical Realist]

That's ridiculous. We are only responsible for the choices we make, not the ones we don't make. And that's because choicemaking is always deliberate, provided it is a free one. Not every choice is free.

[Magical Realist]

“It’s not that we have to quit
this life one day, but it’s how
many things we have to quit
all at once: music, laughter,
the physics of falling leaves,
automobiles, holding hands,
the scent of rain, the concept
of subway trains... if only one
could leave this life slowly!”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

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[Syne]

That's ridiculous. We are only responsible for the choices we make, not the ones we don't make. And that's because choicemaking is always deliberate, provided it is a free one. Not every choice is free.

Apparently you've never heard of the trolley problem.

So if you freely sit indecisive while a man is drowning, even when you're perfectly capable of saving him, you're not responsible for him drowning in any way?
To most people, that would make you a piece of shit.