“Screenplays are structure, and that’s all they are. The quality of writing — which is crucial in almost every other form of literature — is not what makes a screenplay work. Structure isn’t anything else but telling the story, starting as late as possible, starting each scene as late as possible.”
—William Goldman
“We’re falling in love with the spectacular, and the highlights. But that’s a small part of quarterback play; you get about two of those highlights per game. That’s like five percent of football… A lot of movie trailers are amazing. They’re sixty seconds. Very rarely is a movie amazing — that’s two hours and ten minutes.”
—Colin Cowherd
I: The Logic of Mythology
There are three rules to narrative structure, and William Goldman mentions two of them above. The rules are:
Structure is everything.
Begin scenes as late as possible.
End scenes as early as possible.
The succinct way to express this is, “Enter late, leave early.”
Comedy provides a cogent example; every scene should end on the biggest laugh. The exact moment when the audience is roaring and crying with laughter, the film’s director should allow a few seconds for the audience to savor the moment… and then immediately cut to the next scene.
When something is working, the natural temptation is to milk it as long as possible.
Resist this impulse.
Adventures that feel kinetic, which race along at breathtaking velocity, are characterized by omission and implication.
Elmore Leonard says, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”
Writing a novel, screenplay, comic, or television series is a near-infinite puzzle. You could spend a hundred years worrying about the details: color schemes, choreography, names, backstory, character descriptions, worldbuilding logistics, plot twists, vivid imagery, stylistic lines of dialogue… and there would still be more to study.
This is what Leonardo Da Vinci meant when he observed, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
At some point, you must embrace human imperfection, choose a direction, settle upon an aspirational vision which is beautiful and meaningful, then get to work, realizing that the end result will only vaguely resemble the original blueprint. On some level, art always disappoints its creator — even when the product’s popularity, or profitability is a wild success.
Otherwise, the project stalls, loses momentum, and suffocates.
So the question becomes: what is good enough?
Surrendering to imperfection, how can a storyteller create something gorgeous and aspirational, a superb narrative which impacts the audience with wisdom and grandeur… something the writer can be proud of?
Stories offer escapism. Books provide romantic illusions. Readers lose themselves in these perfumed daydreams, experiencing the horrors and sorrows and triumphs of characters who do not exist — but when the book ends, after the creased pages have been shut, a slender kernel of truth remains: Metaphysical truth. A caramel epiphany. Because stories are dense mimetic devices. Fictional movies function as efficient compressions of psychological insights, emotional authenticity.
Morality plays.
Religious sermons.
Frivolous entertainment serves a higher purpose.
George R. R. Martin writes that, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
What this expression translates to, in a literal sense, is that real life is longgggg, and mistakes are expensive. Nobody can predict the future. Many careers consume decades, only to culminate in regret. The cheapest, fastest, most efficient method for a person to gather information and choose their future path is to read stories, consider the moral lessons encoded in the form of outlandish adventures and battles which never happened, then act upon those insights.
That’s the function of stories — to teach lessons, encourage virtue, provoke action, and guide decisions.
Myths and fairy tales are beloved in every culture around the world. Knowledge comes in many forms. But useful, practical skills such as music, science, mathematics, carpentry, software are constantly being updated; refined; forgotten. These are transient forms of expertise, which are extremely powerful in the short-term, and then become historically obsolete during the passage of centuries.
Fictional narratives are peculiar, in the fact that art and entertainment are less useful in the real world than calculus, engineering, or chemistry — but a story like Cinderella, Rapunzel, or Gilgamesh can endure in a recognizable form long after their empirical contemporaries have been buried.
The Ptolemaic, geocentric system of astronomy is a fossil. A historical curiosity. Today the Copernican, heliocentric perspective has proven itself superior. But the favorite myths of two thousand years ago are still remembered, and retold, and adapted into movies — Hercules, Theseus, Perseus, Odysseus, Achilles.
Human nature remains eternal.
Ancient narratives provide useful psychological insights into how history unfolds, and the intrigues of a family, guild, army, church, or kingdom settle into familiar patterns which remain pertinent to modern audiences.
That’s the value proposition of fiction.
Elegant stories distract audiences with theatrical events, monstrous ensembles, and dazzling landscapes, while seeding spiritual insights and moral lessons. Carefully encrypted wisdom.
This is an act of inception, to plant a narrative puzzle in the hearts… minds… souls of the audience.
The delivery mechanism is subtly disguised. Gears churn beneath the surface. Someday the narrative puzzle will be unlocked by the reader, and that act of focused participation is what completes the logic of mythology, causing the moral argument to be internalized.
Storytellers build these narrative puzzles, expressed in the medium of novels, comics, films, television shows, and that encrypted wisdom is designed to be unlocked years later by the audience.
Misdirection functions at the core of these narrative illusions, because the best stories feel realistic — they provide vivid simulations of real life, which captivate fans, and install widespread suspension of disbelief.
This aesthetic camouflage is what makes stories difficult to analyze. It’s a challenge to separate functional mechanics from ornamental spandrels.
Remember this distinction: Functional versus Ornamental.
Every noteworthy artist learns how to hide their fingerprints, to confuse, distract, and misdirect the audience like a magician.
To build a minimum viable product (MVP), there are five core skills:
Prose
Premise
Structure
Theme/Message/Moral Argument
Characters (especially character arcs)
This is the battlefield. This is where the story goes to live, or die.
Almost every writer can craft a single beautiful sentence.
Or paragraph.
Bestselling novels, and enduring cultural touchstones, require superior design… an elegant fusion of dramatic principles, fascinating characters, sobering ethical dilemmas, exotic scenarios, uplifting spiritual lessons, and an immersive setting.
Proper grammar, and smooth passages, crisply executed with keen devotion, struggle to compensate for a poorly-designed narrative.
One breathtaking, cinematic scene cannot overcome an entire book populated by bland characters, or a lack of dramatic momentum in the main plot.
Nonetheless, a pleasurable style adds delight to an adequate plot. Skillful writing is one of the foundational pillars of writing long-form drama.
Prose is enhanced by clever tricks, tricks which radiate beauty, beauty which can soften or sharpen, sharpen into memorable prose.
Even a handful of aesthetic tricks and misdirections can be sprinkled into a narrative with dazzling results. Rhetorical fireworks burst overhead; colorful thunderclaps of sound and fury. Hopefully these theatrics impress the readers. If nothing else, audiences appreciate the creative residue of someone who has deeply invested their emotions into a beloved project, funneling intimate ambitions… dreams… and anxieties into a refined, carefully polished manuscript.
Poetry is the goal.
Profound insight, paired with gorgeous delivery.
“There’s so much to master, from character to dialogue to plot to theme to concept. It’s this machine with a lot of levers and buttons, and it takes a long time to master all those things, and to play them like a pipe organ — well, all at the same time. The more of those pieces you play well, the more you start to get a response to your material, because many things are working in your material at once. Mastering all those levers to get character up here and plot up here and concept up here and marketability up here — to me, that’s the Holy Grail. I think that’s what we all aspire to.”
—Joe Forte, Tales from the Script: 50 Hollywood Writers Share their Stories
TODD MCFARLANE: I’m a guy who likes challenges. As soon as they say “That can’t be done; you can’t sell 1,000,000 copies” — ah, just watch this. It’s not because I wanted to sell 1,000,000 copies that I made $1,000,000. It’s just because they said “It can’t be done.” Me being the little adolescent mentality that I’ve always had, it was like “Watch me. Or at least I’m going to die trying. Watch me.”
The toughest thing in comic books, I think, and you’re a publisher, you know this … is that there’s different groups of people. There might be 10,000 of each one of them, but there’s 10 different age groups that look at 10 different books. Now, if you can actually tap into all of them, there’s a potential to actually get 100,000 people to read your book.
To me, that became my goal, in that I just wanted to see if it was possible to cross the barriers. So it was like, “OK, if I do something that’s a little bit designy, then that will get the attention of the older audiences. But I still have to make the storytelling clear and somewhat simple enough that it wouldn’t confuse the 12-year-old, but I could still put a couple of underlying things so that the 20-and-older group would pick it up that the 8-year-old wouldn’t, but it wouldn’t affect the story.” You have to try and give just enough to everybody so that everybody went home satisfied. Does that mean maybe that if I was just aimed at one group I would have been able to do a better package? Yeah, probably. I would have been able to concentrate more, but I just wanted to see whether I could do it, just from a career point.
—Todd McFarlane, The Comics Journal: Issue 152 (Interview)
II: The Hunter’s Ambition: An Ethos of Distant Pursuit
Human psychology is delusional.
Our minds are not built to process the external world in a “rational” fashion.
Emotional distortions are an inherent feature.
You can either make this irrationality work for you, or against you.
I remember listening to a Navy Seal (Marcus Luttrell) talk about being stranded in enemy territory, wounded deep in the wilderness of Afghanistan, hunted by hundreds of pitiless enemies, surrounded by the corpses of his elite peers — all his friends were dead. His body was ruined. Crippled. He woke up after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, which tossed his body over a nearby ridge. Regaining awareness, he realized he could no longer walk — he had a bullet wound, broken bones, shrapnel embedded in his legs, and an injured spine.
So he crawled.
In one day, he crawled seven miles.
During this blistering ordeal, enemy pursuit continued… a sporadic firefight. Even in this damaged state, he kept fighting with his rifle and grenades — and confirmed additional kills.
This is one of the toughest soldiers in the world — reduced to a geriatric condition, bleeding and dehydrated. Isolated. Exhausted, and trapped.
Thirst wrecked him… he resorted to drinking his own sweat, blood, and urine.
What I remember is his description of how he kept moving, when his physical body was crippled and nearly useless. The adjustment was savage. In one battle, his exceptional stamina and strength was stripped away.
What Marcus Luttrell told himself, in that diminished state, was that he would crawl one more foot… one more foot… one more foot… His entire focus narrowed to the next step, the next patch of dirt. Nothing more than that. A sort of hypnotic mantra settled the ambient stress and chaos into concrete action.
That attitude carried him forward.
In one day, he crawled seven miles.
What stands out to me is that when the situation appeared hopeless, any perspective on the Big Picture completely vanished. Survival was achieved by persistence, persistence which originated with humility… the humility to solve the impossible dilemma by nibbling tiny, insignificant chunks. Crawling was slow. Often he stopped, and rested. But he refused to quit.
Marcus Luttrell survived because he didn’t focus on the entire journey, just the next, most immediate part of the process.
That’s a winning attitude which can translate into any area of life: Break complex tasks into small, manageable pieces. Focus on the immediate problem. Never quit. Do everything you can; force the enemy to stop you.
All of us experience sporadic, sobering moments of existential despair: “What’s the point of all this struggle… Why are we still here? Just to suffer?”
The best cure is five minutes of lifting weights in a crowded gym… a temporary suppressant, until the next period of loneliness and doubt. The competitive instinct stirs. Exercise liberates the body from the tyranny and anxiety of Too Much Thinking™.
Narrow focus, paired with relentless persistence, breeds champions.
We live in a feminized, comfortable Dead Culture. Everything is safe. Relationships are personal commodities. Theology has been supplanted by therapy. Priests or pastors have been abandoned in favor of the friendly psychologist, the attentive listening of the certified psychiatrist.
Therapy encourages honesty, authenticity, introspection.
On some level this is bullshit.
Honesty, authenticity, introspection… all of these are noble qualities to strive towards. But our brains were never meant to be governed by reason. The mind is not constructed of a pristine network of enlightened discourse, neural circuits throbbing and pulsing with cold logic, primitive animal behavior smoothed into neat computational grids of legible interactions.
Marcus Luttrell survived impossible danger by bargaining with himself… purposefully DECEIVING himself.
In one day, he crawled seven miles.
Repeatedly he promised himself — one more foot, then I can rest. Another patch of arid dirt and sand, then I can quit. Repeatedly he betrayed that promise to himself. That deception was necessary to find strength, gather courage.
Therapy culture urges miserable people to change, find discipline…
The easiest way to change, to transform, is to keep the same addictions and vices and weaknesses, accept them, and simply flip those self-destructive impulses into a new medium of expression. A new outlet. A bold direction.
Some kind of productive, beneficial release of deeply ingrained, biologically predetermined compulsions.
Screen addiction is pervasive… the Internet is designed to never stop. Never pause long enough for citizens to ask themselves if it’s time to do something else. Autoplay… Infinite Scroll… Suggested channels… Recommended content… Spammed by notifications, happily chirping urgent messages. One YouTube video finishes, and the next video instantly queues. Users reach the bottom of a Twitter feed, and the next series of interactions immediately surfaces, provoking fascination, prolonging a hypnotic session of aimless browsing.
Passive consumption replaces active participation.
Digital addiction blossoms into habitual insomnia.
One more video… one more blog… one more Substack… one more Tweet.
Users crawl across the digital sands, isolated and entranced… exhausted and trapped.
A deep shame sets in.
Platforms are designed to addict users; users are blamed for being addicted.
Rather than try to fight this process, rather than try to escape the contours of human nature itself, rather than desperately imposing rational order upon the frenetic chaos of an irrational mind, the most effective solution is to embrace the chaos, addiction, and self-deception of the human brain.
Flip that logic.
Rather than focusing on huge ambitions, daunting projects, intimidating goals which only serve to demoralize and prevent accomplishment — embrace the limitations of the human brain. Accept human imperfections. Forgive yourself.
Promise yourself: One step, one small chore, then I can quit.
Then another.
Constant motion towards a distant, aspirational goal — paired with a robotic, relentless persistence — is one of the most formidable formulas for improving your life.
Ordinary people quit, far too early.
Greatness lies on the other side of patience; endurance; preparation; sacrifice; humility; commitment.
When your life slows to a crawl, crawl forward, forward towards victory.
III: Anadiplosis
Art is about identifying eternal, dramatic truths that most people already know — perhaps on an instinctual, subconscious level they are unable to explicitly articulate — then elevating that truth into an aspirational exhortation which encourages the audience to transform their lives, and to heal their communities.
Real life is discouraging; good art is encouraging.
Fiction-based escapism delivers one consistent message: Keep fighting, because life usually gets better when you try your best.
Trust, believe, endure, learn, adapt, and prevail.
Leftist propaganda is designed to humiliate the audience by shaming, browbeating fans… by portraying a dishonest, dysgenic perspective on civilization… by suppressing passion and masculinity… by corrupting childhood and femininity… by desecrating innocence and religion. That’s why nobody enjoys Woke movies — contemporary media is designed to linguistically conquer the audience, rather than inspiring citizens with mythical, heroic archetypes they can emulate in a lifelong quest to become the best version of themselves.
Cinematic nihilism is designed to beat you down with hideous deceits; to teach you a resentful mindset of learned helplessness and self-loathing — and these deceits will always be detestable. Fans will never celebrate when they are forced to sit through humiliation rituals.
Art is about repeating common knowledge, while reframing it in a beautiful way.
A poetic delivery.
Sometimes it’s hard to be poetic… to invent lovely aphorisms, and to weave together pages upon pages of gorgeous, fluid prose.
This is where technique comes in, knowing how to craft the delicate mechanics of semantics.
Anadiplosis is a flamboyant, captivating technique which you can use to intensify and reinforce the texture of your narratives.
One of the tutorials I published earlier under this pseudonym, intended as an introduction to this Substack, elaborated in great depth about a rhetorical device called “Chiasmus”.
Storytelling 101: Chiasmus - Billionaire Psycho (substack.com)
Chiasmus is when a phrase is established, and then immediately reversed in the same sentence. This is an interruption of the normal rhythm of communication, an inversion of the expected logic… a kind of syncopation, or disturbance in tempo, which draws special attention to the relevant material. Double meanings, puns, and various forms of wordplay are useful to deliver a sudden twist; a swift upheaval.
A delightful reversal.
Often, chiasmus is surprisingly funny or clever, and is especially optimized for investigating power relations between two subjects.
We might say: First men build gyms, then gyms build men.
Or
Casinos are able to plunder gamblers, because gamblers desire to plunder casinos.
Or
Girls long for popularity, but rarely does popularity last long for girls.
Or
Thieves chase after money, then institutions with money send police to chase thieves.
Or
Farmers harvest food for the economy; sadly, the economy tends to harvest farmers.
Or
After the destruction of Clownworld, when Gigachad saw an ugly girl, he would dismember that girl with a saw.
Or
Soldiers honor courage, and courage honors soldiers.
Or
When crime escapes justice, sometimes justice demands crime.
Or
I kept bugging the exterminator, until he exterminated my bugs.
Or
Fans dream of being famous, while the famous dream of satisfying fans.
No doubt the pattern seems obvious:
A to B, B to A
There’s a very pleasant symmetry inherent to this arrangement.
To introduce and invert a relationship between two subjects, while remaining succinct and cogent, is difficult. The process is very similar to writing a rhyming, metrical poem such as a sonnet. It’s a game defined by strict rules — rules that are strictly defined for the audience. So if you cheat, readers know. Cheating disappoints fans. But for an artist to play the game, obey the rules, and construct beauty in a constrained formula is quite astonishing, and exciting.
Never neglect small details — never.
Champions do what ordinary men are unwilling to even consider.
If a lot of prose was written in this style, sentence upon sentence of inverted phrases and ideas, needless complexity would interfere with basic communication, and the effect would quickly lose its appeal. Even reading a few consecutive examples starts to feel tedious, saccharine, excessive.
But in small doses, it’s a really cool trick to sprinkle in, and it’s a great exercise in craft, which teaches artists how to focus on subtle, precise details which normally remain subconscious.
Anadiplosis is a similar method of repetition.
There’s a lot of overlap between Anadiplosis and Chiasmus; they’re extremely close in terms of function and structure, but neither trick is a perfect subset encapsulated by the other.
Technically, many examples of Chiasmus can also be classified as Anadiplosis.
For instance, if we consider two famous quotations that feature Chiasmus:
“In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.”
—Croesus
The ancient Greek proverb declared by Croesus cannot be classified as Anadiplosis.
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
—George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
But George Orwell’s assertion qualifies as both Chiasmus, and Anadiplosis.
Wat means?
Anadiplosis is when the end of a phrase, or sentence, immediately repeats to begin the next series of words. So, the pattern is simple:
A to B, B to C
This is a straightforward trick, which can be applied in three methods:
Rhetorical stutter:
A to B, B to C
Thematic Series — A logical progression, escalation, intensification, or regression of some kind of process. Or a list which is linked in terms of causality, or chronology.
A to B,
B to C,
C to D,
D to E…
(ad infinitum)
Circular loop:
A to B, B to C, C to A
Each of these methods is a situational tool, optimized for different kinds of aesthetic effects to stimulate the audience.
The rhetorical stutter pauses, pauses on a significant word. That repetition will emphasize — emphasize a particular detail. Sometimes it’s cool; cool enough to spotlight. When executed with precision, the abrupt oscillation in rhythm feels intriguing.
And clever.
But it’s good to remember that repetition always involves redundant material, so the stylistic flourish needs to be good enough to justify delaying the normal speed of communication.
You might imagine an army of barbarians marching across foreign hills, chanting and singing:
All will despair, despair of their vulnerability.
Soon they will weep, weep the lamentations of women.
Our legions will sing, sing the triumph of barbarism.
Praise be to God, God who created the Earth!
The rhythm feels good.
But only in small doses, used sparingly.
Anadiplosis can also be chained together into a series of related stutters, building together in intensity or presenting a series of related events…
That is repetition, repetition of words, words which escalate, escalate based on the last word or phrase, phrase that ended the previous sentence.
This kind of chained series of repeated words is very useful to indicate how complex historical processes unfold.
To demonstrate how to apply this technique, I selected an excellent passage written by John Michael Greer, where he explained how the Roman Empire colonized foreign territories, consumed available resources, and then began a process of self-cannibalization, which ended up weakening Rome’s manpower, military, and the motherland herself:
“Once a nation was conquered by Rome, it was systematically looted of movable wealth by the conquerors, while local elites were allowed to buy their survival by serving as collection agents for tribute; next, the land was confiscated a chunk at a time so it could be handed out as retirement bonuses to legionaries who had served their twenty years; then some pretext was found for exterminating the local elites and installing a Roman governor; thereafter, the heirs of the legionaries were forced out or bought out, and the land sold to investors in Rome, who turned it into vast corporate farms worked by slaves.”
—John Michael Greer, The Trajectory of Empires
Archdruid Report Mirror: The Trajectory of Empires (archdruidmirror.blogspot.com)
This is a very insightful passage.
The content is highly educational, deciphering the passage of generations, and penetrating polite deceits to articulate an elusive, cynical reality of how empires devour foreigners, then sacrifice their own men as well.
My only criticism is that the observations from this particular sample are difficult for readers to analyze, understand, remember, and internalize, because each stage of the process is explained with a different rhythm.
Anadiplosis can present this information in a more catchy, digestible format:
Empire sent forth soldiers, soldiers conquered distant territories, distant territories were governed by local puppets, local puppets were replaced by retired legionnaires, retired legionaries were impoverished by bankers, bankers brought in compliant slave labor, until slavery and destitution was all that remained of the glory of Rome’s empire.
Notice how this sentence begins, and ends with the same word: Empire.
That’s a circular loop.
Readers won’t immediately pick up on that level of subtlety, but when they see it, the author appears brilliant.
Somehow phrases can cycle, cycle with escalating intensity, intensity that races forward, forward into darkness, darkness that reverses, reverses somehow.
Time marches on, on to bright futures, futures which reflect, reflect their original time.
Anadiplosis can flow, flow in circular fashion, fashion that builds Anadiplosis.
One question would be — How much does any of this impact the popularity, cultural impact, critical acclaim, or commercial profitability of a creative franchise?
The most honest answer would be that refining prose is a peripheral endeavor, which is much less impactful than superb marketing, advertising, distribution, choosing art for a book cover, designing relatable characters and terse dialogue and an exotic concept, negotiating a contract, or hundreds of more useful skills. Anadiplosis is quite marginal, and has almost no relationship with whether a product is good enough to connect with a sizable audience.
A lot of technique, and product quality, is completely irrelevant to success.
But you never know the difference between success and failure. So you just try to make everything the highest quality you can, keep working, focus on the process, iterate small details, and just get one percent better every day.
One small leak probably won’t sink a ship.
One hundred small leaks definitely will.
There will always be flaws and imperfections in any manuscript, and the goal is just to make everything as beautiful as it can be, as brilliant as you are capable of, to fix as many flaws as you can fix, hide the rest, and then hope the good parts outweigh the bad.
Neil Gaiman famously said in his 2012 Commencement Speech at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts:
“Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be — an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics and supporting myself through my words — was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal.
And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain. I said no to editorial jobs on magazines, proper jobs that would have paid proper money because I knew that, attractive though they were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. And if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them, because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at the time.
…
When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.”
First impressions matter.
The attitude of designing art like a message in a bottle is crucial, because new readers won’t encounter your complete body of work all at once. Strangers stumble upon some random, arbitrary sample of your creative production. Usually your best work goes the most viral, gets praised and recommended, and all is well. Sometimes people see your worst stories, feel disgust, never read anything else again, and it feels horrible. But the serendipity, or zemblanity (which means a terrible misfortune) of random chance should be factored into how you publish content.
Research collected by television networks discovered that the median, casual viewer only watched one out of every three, or four episodes selected from their favorite long-running serial franchises. Television is designed with brief reminders at the beginning of each episode so that audiences feel confident they are able to understand the drama. And the episodes themselves are designed to be watched out of sequence, with self-contained installments, and interwoven subplots, and series-long character arcs, to facilitate this kind of disordered media consumption.
Anything you create, remember that it might be the only essay, song, video, comic, tweet, poem, speech, podcast, painting, or story that someone else sees from you. Don’t be stressed by that. Just make it a habit that anytime you create art, there’s an intentionality to it, a carefulness and beauty which defines your work.
Maybe that won’t be enough. But if you fail, you can console yourself that you did everything in your power to succeed.
What is success?
You can be successful at counting blades of grass. Is that success? No, that isn’t success.
These are the kinds of deep, illuminating questions you can ask yourself, to really probe the limits of the human condition, and explore the most provocative boundaries of contemporary academia.
Not all of us can ruminate with such forceful clarity.
Not all of us can be the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and the author of five books, including “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.”
But for the lesser mortals among us, the obligation, or compulsion to create meaningful art must suffice.
I do know of one famous instance of a screenwriter who secured a notable contract as a result of Anadiplosis — writing for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.
Lord Of The Rings fellowship of the ring Behind The Scenes - YouTube
At 44 minutes and 30 seconds into this documentary, Philippa Boyens mentions that she was tasked with writing the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring movie, narrated by Galadriel’s voiceover. This was tacitly understood as an audition, where she needed to demonstrate her expertise as a storyteller to be hired permanently, and it was her line, “History became legend… legend became myth. And some things that should not have been forgotten… were lost,” which charmed Peter Jackson and his wife Fran enough to extend a formal offer.
Life can be random like that.
Lenin observed that there are decades where nothing happens; and weeks where decades happen.
Personal success follows a similar principle — years are spent grinding away in obscurity. Incrementally improving, improving, improving while nothing changes. And it’s easy to lose sight of a distant dream, and for relentless preparation, preparation, preparation to inflict a demoralizing fatigue onto the anxious, self-conscious dreamer.
At the end of the day, all you can do — is the best you can do.
Never quit learning, and searching, and seeking to apply that knowledge in creative, useful ways.
Examples:
1.)
“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
—Yoda
2.)
“Hard times create strong men,
Strong men create good times,
Good times create weak men,
And weak men create hard times.”
—G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
3.)
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
—Romans 5:3-5
4.)
“The love of wicked men converts to fear;
That fear to hate; and hate turns one, or both,
To worthy danger, and deserved death.”
—William Shakespeare, Richard II
5.)
“The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor. Striking story!”
—David Franzoni, Gladiator
6.)
“For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love.”
—2nd Peter 1:5-7
7.)
“For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,”
—John Milton, Lycidas
8.)
“What I present here is what I remember of the letter, and what I remember of the letter I remember verbatim (including that awful French).”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
9.)
“He retained his virtues amidst all his misfortunes — misfortunes which no prudence could foresee or prevent.”
—Francis Bacon, “Untitled”
10.)
“The mountains look on Marathon — And Marathon looks on the sea…”
—Lord Byron, The Isles of Greece
11.)
“I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.”
—William Butler Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
12.)
“Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,
When I give, I give myself.”
—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
13.)
“Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern, and then you go on into some action.”
—Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet
14.)
Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven:
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door — Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore —
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore —
Nameless here for evermore.
—Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven
15.)
“Don’t you surrender! Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith; in the end faith will not disappoint.”
—Jesse Jackson
16.)
“Aboard my ship, excellent performance is standard. Standard performance is sub-standard. Sub-standard performance is not permitted to exist.”
—Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny
17.)
“The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair.”
—John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
18.)
“If virtue does not equal powers, powers will be misused.”
—John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
19.)
“Without a healthy economy, we can’t have a healthy society. And without a healthy society, the economy won’t stay healthy for long.”
—Margaret Thatcher
20.)
“Though Nature hath given us wit to flout at Fortune, hath not Fortune sent in this fool to cut off the argument?”
—William Shakespeare, As you Like It
21.)
“Turn the lights out now
Now I’ll take you by the hand
Hand you another drink
Drink it if you can
Can you spend a little time?
Time is slipping away
Away from us so stay
Stay with me I can make
Make you glad you came.”
—The Wanted, Glad You Came
22.)
“You’re a comedic genius, genius comedian, comedian extraordinaire,”
—Zinnia
23.)
“All you need is love, love is all you need.”
—Beatles, All you need is Love
24.)
“The frog was a prince
The prince was a brick
The brick was an egg
The egg was a bird.”
—Genesis, Supper’s Ready
25.)
“Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
—Henry James, The Middle Years
26.)
“To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream”
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
27.)
“I come back and look at Mr. Potter.
“Mr. Potter,” I write, and I put clothes on him, even though I do not see him naked, for he was my father, and just now he is not yet dead.”
—Jamaica Kinkaid, Those Words that Echo… Echo… Echo Through Life
28.)
“Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character.”
—Vince Lombardi
29.)
“The hard must become habit. The habit must become easy. The easy must become beautiful.”
—Doug Henning
30.)
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”
—Lao Tzu
31.)
“Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance.”
—James Allen, As A Man Thinketh
32.)
“Sow an act, and you reap a habit;
Sow a habit, and you reap a character;
Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”
—Samuel Smiles, Happy Homes and the Hearts That Make Them
33.)
“But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their irises are one yard high.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
34.)
“Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
35.)
“Michael sat and thought for a moment. All he ever did was sit quietly. He wondered if he should lie. Lying would have been easier, but there was no real point.”
—T. R. Hudson, Automaton
Amazon.com: Automaton eBook : Hudson, T.R. : Kindle Store
36.)
“I think about the price. The price of appetite.”
—Taylor Sheridan, Sicario (screenplay draft, never filmed)
37.)
“They must be forced to look at all they have destroyed. By having the same done to them. Or they will forget... Forget they are human.”
—Taylor Sheridan, Sicario (screenplay draft, never filmed)
38.)
“You hear that line? Line’s for you.”
—Andrew Dominik, Killing Them Softly
39.)
“What I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.”
—Luc Besson, Taken
40.)
“Every hurt is a lesson, and every lesson makes you better.”
—George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
41.)
“Everything after, nothing. Nothing in comparison to that one minute.”
—Steven Knight, Peaky Blinders: Season One: Episode Six
42.)
“When you’re looking at any kind of contract, you can safely assume that it’s structured in a way to benefit the publisher. Not necessarily to your detriment, but that’s often what will be the result. They’re not going to give you anything for free. Any service they provide, or product they provide, no one is going to give up anything more than they have to.
That’s just how capitalism works.
Every time you look at your contract, you can assume your publisher is going to be looking to make as much off you as possible, and pay you as little money as they can get away with. That’s not because they’re bad people, it’s that their duty is to their shareholders.
And that’s a legal duty, it’s not even an ethical or moral duty.
They’re legally obligated to act in the best interest of their shareholders. And the best way to act in the interest of their shareholders is to maximize share value. And the way to maximize share value is to maximize their profit. And one way to maximize their profit is to minimize their costs. And their costs, as a publisher, are their authors.”
—Richard Swan, Publishing Rodeo: Episode Four
43.)
“"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
—John Adams
44.)
“That weapon… is our refusal! Our refusal to bow to any order but our own!”
—Neil Jordan, Michael Collins (screenplay)
45.)
“Anadiplosis uses repetition. Repetition confers emphasis. Emphasis creates great power.”
—Katy Waldman, Slate.com
46.)
“Each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”
—James 1:14-15
47.)
“Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution.”
—George W. Bush, address to Congress on September 20th, 2001
48.)
“For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas?”
—John Milton, Lycidas
49.)
“When your cable company keeps you on hold, you get angry. When you get angry, you go blow off steam. When you go blow off steam, accidents happen. When accidents happen, you get an eye patch. When you get an eye patch, people think you’re tough. When people think you’re tough, people want to see how tough. And when people want to see how tough, you wake up in a roadside ditch. Don’t wake up in a roadside ditch: Get rid of cable and upgrade to DIRECTV.”
—DirectTV ad
50.)
“And now we’re together. Together, together. It was that easy.”
—Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
51.)
“Something happens at the end of daylight savings time. The days are already shorter, shorter, the sunset starts at 3. The whole afternoon is weird cold queasy twilight.”
—Delicious Tacos, Seasonal Affective Disorder
52.)
“Then somewhere, somewhere in the stone’s rat maze down there, tiny but unmuffled, a pane-glass window shattered. The sound was almost pretty, like chimes. The chimes became a single ringing bell, a burglar alarm, the old kind.”
—Frank Miller, Batman: Year One, The Deluxe Edition (1988), Preface
53.)
“The details coalesce in his mind as his mind coalesces from oblivion.”
—Peter Watts, HitchHiker
54.)
“Only to live, to live and live. Life, whatever it may be!”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
55.)
“I like that you’re broken, broken like me
Maybe that makes me a fool
I like that you’re lonely, lonely like me
I could be lonely with you.”
—LovelytheBand, Broken
56.)
“Welcome to Gotham, Jimmy. It’s not as bad as it looks. Especially if you’re a cop. Cops got it made in Gotham.”
—Frank Miller, Batman: Year One
57.)
“It will get worse. Practically, there will be no jobs soon. First you will be replaced by cheap overseas labor. Then cheap overseas labor will be replaced by robots.”
—Delicious Tacos, Drunk Thoughts on Global Capitalism
58.)
“Territory doesn’t matter. Especially when you consider it’s the fight for territory that brings the bodies, and the bodies bring the police.”
—Stringer Bell, The Wire: Season Three: Episode One
59.)
“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”
—George Lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope
60.)
“Governments in the variations which most commonly happen to them, do proceed from order to confusion, and that confusion afterwards turns to order again. For Nature having fixed no sublunary things, as soon as they arrive at their acme and perfection, being capable of no farther ascent, of necessity they decline. So, on the other side, when they are reduced to the lowest pitch of disorder, having no farther to descend, they recoil again to their former perfection: good Laws degenerating into bad customs, and bad customs engendering good Laws. For, virtue begets peace; peace begets idleness; idleness, mutiny; and mutiny, destruction: and then, vice versa; that ruin begets laws; those laws, virtue; and virtue begets honor and good success.”
—Niccolo Machiavelli, History of Florence: Book V
61.)
“Nor does this preference for a republic contradict his conclusion that the leadership of a prince was required for the national unification of Italy. If a republic is the best form of government, it does not follow that a republic is possible at every moment and for all things. Machiavelli’s preferences are always disciplined by the truth. The truth here, as he correctly saw it, was that Italy could not then be unified except, in the initial stages at least, through a prince.”
—James Burnham, The Machiavellians
62.)
“All right. This place and Dinette and Ostrich Farm are all — they’re all the stereotype. 43 year old white people in tangentially creative fields with robust salaries. Drivers of unusual Mini Coopers with ski racks. Girls with weird old money inbred jawlines and purple hair discussing a Tumblr about Women in Tech. People using the word curate. Curate is the new monetize. Get paid for something worthless. I hate white people.”
—Delicious Tacos, Coffee Shop Diary: First World Problems
63.)
“Re-industrialization requires more than Trump. It requires reversals on women, crime, and diversity in the workplace. Which is nowhere remotely near being on the Trump agenda. Allowing Trump to win merely because it is obvious to everyone that the overwhelming majority vote for him is, for most, radically unthinkable, but equally, it is nowhere near enough to attain the desired outcome. The desired outcome being that imperial apparatchiks will continue to enjoy the empire that the industrial might of America gained.”
—Jim’s Blog, A Retraction
https://blog.reaction.la/party-politics/a-retraction/
64.)
“Suffering produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”
—Jeremy Lin
65.)
“At the end, he understood. He understood the portents, knew a dazzling transformation was at hand for mankind. The brutal world he’d relished would simply cease to be, its fierce and brawling denizens rushing to join the mastodon in obsolescence… in extinction.”
—Alan Moore, Watchmen: Issue Eleven
66.)
“42nd Street: Women’s breasts draped across every billboard, every display, littering the sidewalk. Was offered Swedish love and French love… but not American love.
American love; like coke in green glass bottles… they don’t make it anymore.”
—Alan Moore, Watchmen: Issue Two
67.)
“He would have made you a poor envoy then.”
“He made me a poor envoy in any case. The storm lords will not rise for me. It seems they do not like me, and the justice of my cause means nothing to them. The cravenly ones will sit behind their walls waiting to see how the wind rises and who is likely to triumph. The bold ones have already declared for Renly. For Renly!” He spat out the name like poison on his tongue.”
—George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
68.)
“It betrayed Isildur to his death. And some things that should not have been forgotten... were lost.
Thus a Third Age of Middle-Earth began. History became legend... legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the Ring passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, it ensnared a new bearer.”
—Peter Jackson, The Fellowship of the Ring
69.)
“In the name of the Drowned God I summon you. I summon all of you! Leave your halls and hovels, your castles and your keeps, and return to Nagga’s hill to make a kingsmoot!”
The Merlyn gaped at him. “A kingsmoot? There has not been a true kingsmoot in . . .”
“. . . too long a time!” Aeron cried in anguish.
—George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
70.)
“We shall have no king but from the kingsmoot.” The Damphair stood. “No godless man—”
“—may sit the Seastone Chair, aye.” Euron glanced about the tent. “As it happens I have oft sat upon the Seastone Chair of late. It raises no objections.” His smiling eye was glittering. “Who knows more of gods than I? Horse gods and fire gods, gods made of gold with gemstone eyes, gods carved of cedar wood, gods chiseled into mountains, gods of empty air… I know them all. I have seen their peoples garland them with flowers, and shed the blood of goats and bulls and children in their names. And I have heard the prayers, in half a hundred tongues. Cure my withered leg, make the maiden love me, grant me a healthy son. Save me, succor me, make me wealthy… protect me! Protect me from mine enemies, protect me from the darkness, protect me from the crabs inside my belly, from the horselords, from the slavers, from the sellswords at my door. Protect me from the Silence.” He laughed. “Godless? Why, Aeron, I am the godliest man ever to raise sail! You serve one god, Damphair, but I have served ten thousand. From Ib to Asshai, when men see my sails, they pray.”
The priest raised a bony finger. “They pray to trees and golden idols and goat-headed abominations. False gods…”
“Just so,” said Euron, “and for that sin I kill them all.
—George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
71.)
“So long as I have my nuncle of Ten Towers, I have Harlaw.”
Harlaw was not the largest of the Iron Islands, but it was the richest and most populous, and Lord Rodrik’s power was not to be despised. On Harlaw, Harlaw had no rival. The Volmarks and Stonetrees had large holdings on the isle and boasted famous captains and fierce warriors of their own, but even the fiercest bent beneath the scythe. The Kennings and the Myres, once bitter foes, had long ago been beaten down to vassals.”
—George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
72.)
“Bronze makes weapons and gods who inspire men, and men in turn make themselves into the image of the gods. There is no division between any of these domains of excellence; they are united in pursuit of the same goal.”
—Paulos MythPilot, Uncomfortable Discoveries
Uncomfortable Discoveries - by Paulos - Myth Pilot
73.)
“In spite of my dead father, in spite of having been a child in a symmetrical garden of Hai Feng, was I — now — going to die? Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me… The almost intolerable recollection of Madden's horselike face banished these wanderings.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
74.)
“I started to ask how it was possible for the House Absolute (which I had always imagined a vast palace of gleaming towers and domed halls) to be invisible; but Thecla was already thinking of something else altogether, stroking a bracelet formed like a kraken, a kraken whose tentacles wrapped the white flesh of her arm; its eyes were cabochon emeralds.”
—Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
75.)
“Peer review thrives on the fiction that the gatekeeping they do is rigorous. Yet the replication crisis shows that the standards of peer review are nowhere near the threshold needed for truth. Truth isn’t a priority; publishing and not biting the academic-industrial-complex hand that feeds you is the much greater concern. We’ve raised a generation of scientists who only work on stuff that’s acceptable to authorities and lie constantly about the impact of their legion of papers. Is it any wonder that we haven’t progressed much scientifically?”
—Jimmy Song, Bitcoin Magazine: Corruption of Gatekeepers
76.)
“This amorphous grouping of nepotistic networks is the reduced version of the overall franchise that fills the halls of our upper strata today.
Individuals abandon responsibility.
Irresponsibility creates apathy.
Apathy allows oligarchy.
Oligarchy assumes responsibility.
Rinse and repeat.”
—Argo, Global Paradox 2023
Global Paradox 2023 - by Argo - The Professional Amateur (substack.com)
77.)
“A great battle is a terrible thing,” the old knight said “but in the midst of blood and carnage, there is sometimes also beauty, beauty that could break your heart. I will never forget the way the sun looked when it set upon the Redgrass Field… ten thousand men had died, and the air was thick with moans and lamentations, but above us the sky turned gold and red and orange, so beautiful it made me weep to know that my sons would never see it.”
—George R. R. Martin, The Sword Sword
78.)
“The last lines run the pool is up to the wall at Westgate. The Watcher in the Water took Oin. We cannot get out. The end comes, and then drums, drums in the deep. I wonder what that means. The last thing written is in a trailing scrawl of elf-letters: they are coming. There is nothing more.’ Gandalf paused and stood in silent thought.”
—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
79.)
“Westeros is torn and bleeding, and I do not doubt that even now my sweet sister is binding up the wounds… with salt. Cersei is as gentle as King Maegor, as selfless as Aegon the Unworthy, as wise as Mad Aerys. She never forgets a slight, real or imagined. She takes caution for cowardice and dissent for defiance. And she is greedy. Greedy for power, for honor, for love.”
—George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
80.)
“He was not wrong. Davos sat beside his candle and looked at the letters he had scratched out word by word during the days of his confinement. I was a better smuggler than a knight, he had written to his wife, a better knight than a King’s Hand, a better King’s Hand than a husband. I am so sorry. Marya, I have loved you. Please forgive the wrongs I did you.”
—George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
81.)
“Because it would be wrong. And it would be wrong because it’s too easy. And the easy things are not rewarding, are they, you don’t feel good when you beat your five year old in soccer or ping-pong.”
—Tucker Carlson
82.)
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
—Viktor Frankl
83.)
“You think Axe is wrong because you don’t understand his moves. You don’t understand them because they’re emotional. He’s emotional because he’s fighting for his life. That’s what this raise is. The fact that you can’t fully understand that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. It means you haven’t gone beyond your own limits.”
—Adam Perlman, Billions: Season Three: Episode Nine
84.)
“If you're not talented, you won't succeed. And if you're not succeeding, you should know when to quit. When is that? I don't know. It's different for each writer.”
—Stephen King, Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully (in Ten Minutes)
85.)
“We don’t go to the movies for a dose of reality — we go to escape. Yet in the darkness of the theater, as the laws of nature are suspended, and our pulse quickens with the shadows flickering on screen, we hope to experience truth. Truth, not imagination, is what makes a film a revelation, and separates the merely entertaining from the great. But the truth only appears when the filmmaker has first faced it himself.”
—Lafayette Lee, Christopher Nolan’s Sleight of Hand
IM — Christopher Nolan's Sleight of Hand (im1776.com)
86.)
“Another "day" went by before Hladik understood.
He had asked God for a whole year to finish his work; His omnipotence had granted it. God had worked a secret miracle for him; German lead would kill him at the set hour, but in his mind a year would go by between the order and its execution. From perplexity he passed to stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden gratitude.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, The Secret Miracle
87.)
“The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt — and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is.”
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden
88.)
“Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living in their death and dying in their life.”
—Heraclitus
89.)
“‘All life is sex, and all sex is competition, and there are no rules to that game. There is one person in charge of every office in America. That person is Charles Darwin.’
Darwinism here is merely a motif for an experienced reality, not a description of it. It is a way for a Sociopath to explain his condition to others using the categories of our times. A thousand years ago, an awakened Sociopath might have used any of a hundred theological motifs for the same idea: the absence of god, the absence of deeper meanings beneath visible social realities.”
—Venkatesh Rao, The Gervais Principle VI: Children of an Absent God
The Gervais Principle VI: Children of an Absent God (ribbonfarm.com)
90.)
“In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the woman. That’s why you gotta make your own moves.”
—Oliver Stone, Scarface
91.)
“The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage.”
—Thucydides
92.)
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
93.)
“The vicissitudes of this market form a substrate, and that substrate is a platform, and that platform is a scaffold, and unto this scaffold develops an entity which inhabits a new stratum of being. In that place there exists a mind without awareness, a ravenous and insatiable hunger borne of a timeless cogitation. It is perception without experience, it is desire without pleasure, it is memory without locality.”
—ZeroHPLovecraft, The Gig Economy
The Gig Economy - Zero HP Lovecraft (substack.com)
94.)
“Greatness inspires envy, envy engenders spite, spite spawns lies. You must know this, Dumbledore.”
—J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince