David Petrou's quotes file

From Rusticus I received the impression that my character required
improvement and discipline; and from him I learned not to be led
astray to sophistic emulation, nor to writing on speculative matters,
nor to delivering little hortatory orations, nor to showing myself off
as a man who practices much discipline, or does benevolent acts in
order to make a display; and to abstain from rhetoric, and poetry, and
fine writing; and not to walk about in the house in my outdoor dress,
nor to do other things of the kind; and to write my letters with
simplicity, like the letter which Rusticus wrote from Sinuessa to my
mother; and with respect to those who have offended me by words, or
done me wrong, to be easily disposed to be pacified and reconciled, as
soon as they have shown a readiness to be reconciled; and to read
carefully, and not to be satisfied with a superficial understanding of
a book; nor hastily to give my assent to those who talk overmuch; and
I am indebted to him for being acquainted with the discourses of
Epictetus, which he communicated to me out of his own collection.
  -from book one of The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

From Alexander the grammarian, [I learned] to refrain from
fault-finding, and not in a reproachful way to chide those who uttered
any barbarous or solecistic or strange-sounding expression; but
dexterously to introduce the very expression which ought to have been
used, and in the way of answer or giving confirmation, or joining in
an inquiry about the thing itself, not about the word, or by some
other fit suggestion.
  -from book one of The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

From Alexander the Platonic, not frequently nor without necessity to
say to any one, or to write in a letter, that I have no leisure; nor
continually to excuse the neglect of duties required by our relation
to those with whom we live, by alleging urgent occupations.
  -from book one of The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

[...] I have assigned many of my father's basses to students, without
endangering their lives.  Also, they do no harm to the fingers.
  -from _Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments_
   by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

The thorough-bass is the most perfect foundation of music.  It is
played with both hands on a keyboard instrument in such a way that the
left hand plays the written notes, while the right hand strikes
consonances and dissonances, so that this results in a full-sounding
_Harmonie_ to the Honour of God and the permissible delight of the
soul.  The ultimate end or final goal of all music, including the
thorough-bass shall be nothing but for the honour of God and the
renewal of the soul.  Where these factors are not taken into
consideration, there is no true music, rather, a devilish bawling and
droning [Teuflisches Geplerr und Geleyer].
  -from _Precepts and Principles for Playing the Thorough-Bass or
  Accompanying in Four Parts_ by J.S. Bach

I have the fury of my own momentum.  -Bob

The union of uppercase and lowercase roman letters -- in which the
upper case has seniority but the lower case has the power -- has held
firm for twelve centuries.  This constitutional monarchy of the
alphabet is one of the most durable of European cultural institutions.
  -from _The Elements of Typographic Style_ by Robert Bringhurst

Think of the blank page as alpine meadow, or as the purity of
undifferentiated being.  The typographer enters this space and must
change it.  The reader will enter it later, to see what the
typographer has done.  The underlying truth of the blank page must be
infringed, but it must never altogether disappear -- and whatever
displaces it might well aim to be as lively and peaceful as it is.
  -from _The Elements of Typographic Style_ by Robert Bringhurst

Il dottore entra e fa un saluto circolare; il suo sguardo non si ferma
sulla moglie ma certo ha registrato che c'è un uomo che parla con
lei.  Va avanti fino in fondo al locale, dando le spalle al bar; mette
una moneta nel biliardino elettrico.  Ecco che io che dovevo passare
inosservato sono stato scrutato, fotografato da occhi cui non posso
illudermi di esser sfuggito, occhi che non dimenticano nulla e nessuno
che si riferisca all'oggetto della gelosia e del dolore.  Bastano
quegli occhi un po' pesanti e un po' acquosi a farmi capire che il
dramma che c'è stato tra loro non è ancora finito: lui continua a
venire ogni sera in questo caffè per vederla, per farsi riaprire la
vecchia ferita, forse per sapere chi è che la accompagna a casa
stasera; e lei viene ogni sera in questo caffè forse apposta per farlo
soffrire, o forse sperando che l'abitudine a soffrire diventi per lui
un'abitudine come un'altra, acquisti il sapore del neinte che le impasta
la bocca e la vita da anni.
  -da _Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore_ di Italo Calvino

You don't play pinball with just your hands, you play it with the
groin too.  The pinball problem is not to stop the ball before it's
swallowed by the mouth at the bottom, or to kick it back to midfield
like a half-back.  The problem is to make it stay up where the lighted
targets are more numerous and have it bounce from one to another,
wandering, confused, delirious, but still a free agent.  And you
achieve this not by jolting the ball but by transmitting vibrations to
the case, the frame, but gently, so the machine won't catch on and say
Tilt.  You can only do it with the groin, or with a play of the hips
that makes the groin not so much bump, as slither, keeping you on this
side of an orgasm.  And if the hips move according to nature, it's the
buttocks that supply the forward thrust, but gracefully, so that when
the thrust reaches the pelvic area, it is softened, as in homeopathy,
where the more you shake a solution and the more the drug dissolves in
the water added gradually, until the drug has almost entirely
disappeared, the more medically effective and potent it is.  Thus from
the groin an infinitesimal pulse is transmitted to the case, and the
machine obeys, the ball moves against nature, against inertia, against
gravity, against the laws of dynamics, and against the cleverness of
its constructor, who wanted it disobedient.  The ball is intoxicated
with vis movendi, remaining in play for memorable and immemorial
lengths of time.  But a female groin is required, one that interposes
no spongy body between the ileum and the machine, and there must be no
erectile matter in between, only skin, nerves, padded bone sheathed in
a pair of jeans, and a sublimated erotic fury, a sly frigidity, a
disinterested adaptability to the partner's response, a taste for
arousing desire without suffering the excess of one's own: the Amazon
must drive the pinball crazy and savor the thought that she will then
abandon it.
  -from _Foucault's Pendulum_ by Umberto Eco

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
  -Mohandas Gandhi

[If you could see him] watching over everything and bringing back to
the rhythm and the beat, out of thirty or even forty musicians, the
one with a nod, another by tapping with his foot, the third with a
warning finger, given the right note to one from the top of his voice,
to another from the bottom, and to a third from the middle of it ---
all alone, in the midst of the greatest din made by all the
participants, and, although he is executing the most difficult parts
himself, noticing at once whenever and wherever a mistake occurs,
holding everyone together, taking precautions everywhere, and
repairing any unsteadiness, full of rhythm in every part of his
body --- this one man taking in all these harmonies with his keen
ear and emitting with his voice alone the tone of all the voices.
Favorer as I am of antiquity, the accomplishments of our Bach, and
of any others who may be like him, appear to me to effect what not
many Orpheuses, nor twenty Arions, could achieve.
  -On Bach's conducting, by Johann Matthias Gesner

...durch planmässiges Tattonieren [...through systematic feeling
about].
  -Karl Friedrich Gauss, when asked how he came upon his theorems

Surely you remember that I have always been a passionate defender of
the minor third and got annoyed at all you Toms, Dicks, and Harrys of
musical theory who do not want to accept this interval as a gift of
Nature.  Yet, a gut or wire string certainly does not have such high
standing that Nature would have entrusted her harmonies to it alone
and exclusively.  After all, a human being ranks higher; and it is to
the human being that Nature has granted the minor third so that he can
express with the most intimate delight the unnameable feelings of
yearning; besides, Man is a part of Nature, and it is he who knows how
to absorb, regulate, and modify the most delicate relationships of all
the manifestations of the Universe.
  -Goethe

Good tea is for the few, poison tea for the many.
  -Kung Fu flick circa 1978

When [Arthur Rosenthal] was a student, many years before, he roomed
with Landau.  One day Landau came home and complained about the long
and boring afternoon he had just spent with old man Dedekind.
Beginning to lose his grip, all Dedekind would talk about was the old
days --- he complained bitterly about those hard, unkind, and unfair
questions he was asked on his Ph.D. exam --- by Gauss.
  -Paul Halmos

I remember being told that Godel kept trying to use his ultra-
precisionistic logical habits in ordinary human affairs.  When at the
beginning of World War II he had to answer a bureaucratically and
unintelligently designed draft questionnaire, he became confused and
sowed even greater confusion.  Instead of answering the unanswerable
questions with an impatient yes or no, the way most of us did, he
would write lengthy and involved essays explaining that if the
question meant A, then the answer was X, but if it meant B,
then... and so on.
  -Paul Halmos

[...] when Gould himself wrote a check, or (very rarely) gave an
autograph [...], he signed himself `Glen.'  I asked him once about
that, and he fielded the question with some absurd story about having
discovered long ago that once he got his hand to start making the
wiggles for the two Ns, he couldn't stop and would go on and write
three Ns.  So he decided to abort the process after only one N.  This
supposed lack of manual control is a little hard to swallow coming
from the man who could play an unbroken stream of thirty-second notes
faster and cleaner than any other pianist on the face of the earth.
  -from _Glenn Gould at Work --- Creative Lying_ by Andrew Kazdin

There are moments --- above all when I have been reading for a long
time in the works of the great Sebastian Bach --- in which the
numerical relationships of music, indeed the mystical rules of
counterpoint, awaken in me an inward terror.
  -E.T.A. Hoffmann

Hello Kitty does not have a mouth.  She does have a nose, however,
allowing her to breathe, which is why her head is inflated and her
body small.  Outside, yes, she is the lovable, cute Kitty cat from the
Land of the Rising Sun, but inside her life is that of a living
hell.  She has no mouth and cannot eat, she wishes she can, but the
lack of a mouth hinders that.  `I have no mouth, and I must scream.'
  -Daniel Holliman

A few weeks ago I left Italy in that really demoralized condition into
which Italy throws those confiding spirits who give her unlimited
leave to please them.  Beauty, I had come to believe, was an exclu-
sively Italian possession, the human face was not worth looking at
unless redeemed by an Italian smile, nor the human voice worth
listening to unless attuned to Italian vowels.  A landscape was no
landscape without vines festooned to fig-trees swaying in a hot wind
--- a mountain a hideous excrescence unless melting off into a Tuscan
haze.
  -from _Collected Travel Writings_ by Henry James

The powers of even the most god-like intelligences amongst us are
extremely limited, and none of us could get very far in discovering
any part whatever of the Truth if we could not make trains of
reasoning which we have thought through and verified, very ready for
and easy in future application by being made as nearly mechanical as
possible.
  -Jourdain

When natural music is heightened and polished by art, there man first
beholds and can with great wonder examine to a certain extent, (for it
cannot be wholly seized or understood) the great and perfect wisdom of
God in His marvellous work of music, in which this is most singular
and indeed astonishing, that one man sings a simple tune or tenor (as
musicians call it), together with which three, four or five voices
also sing, which as it were play and skip delightedly round this
simple tune or tenor, and wonderfully grace and adorn the said tune
with manifold devices and sounds, performing as it were a heavenly
dance, so that those who at all understand it and are moved by it must
be greatly amazed, and believe that there is nothing more
extraordinary in the world than such a song adorned with many voices.
  - Martin Luther, 1564

I am afraid of people with too much charm.  They devour you.  In the
end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift
and their insincerity.
  -from _The Gentleman in the Parlour_ by W. Somerset Maugham

    There is precious little you can gain from a pinball machine.  Only
some lights that convert to a score count. On the other hand, there is
a great deal to lose. All the coppers you'd ever need to erect statues
of every president in history (provided, of course, you thought well
enough to erect a statue of Richard M. Nixon), not to mention a lot of
valuable and nonreturnable time.
    While you're playing yourself out in lonesome dissipation in front
of a pinball machine, someone else might be reading through Proust.
Still another might be engaged in heavy petting with a girlfriend at a
drive-in theatre showing of _Paths of Courage_.  The one could well
become a writer, witness to the age; the others; a happily married
couple.
    Pinball machines, however, won't lead you anywhere.  Just the
replay light.  Replay, replay, replay...  So persistently you'd swear
a game of pinball aspired to perpetuity.
    We ourselves will never know much of perpetuity.  But we can get a
faint inkling of what it's like.
    The object of pinball lies not in self-expression, but in
self-revolt.  Not in the expansion of the ego, but in its compression.
Not in extractive analysis, but in inclusive subsumption.
    So if it's self-expression or ego-expansion or analysis you're
after, you'll only be subjected to the merciless retaliation of the
tilt lamps.
    Have a nice game.
  -from _Pinball, 1973_ by Haruki Murakami

    Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl.  The boy was
eighteen and the girl sixteen.  He was not unusually handsome, and she
was not especially beautiful.  They were just an ordinary lonely boy
and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others.  But they believed
with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the
100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them.  Yes, they
believed in a miracle.  And that miracle actually happened.
    One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a 
street.
    `This is amazing,' he said.  `I've been looking for you all my
life.  You may not believe this, but you're the 100% perfect girl for
me.'
    `And you,' she said to him, `are the 100% perfect boy for me,
exactly as I'd pictured you in every detail.  It's like a dream.'
    They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their
stories hour after hour.  They were not lonely anymore.  They had
found and been found by their 100% perfect other.  What a wonderful
thing it is to find and be found your 100% perfect other.  It's a
miracle, a cosmic miracle.
    As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took
root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one's dreams to come
true so easily?
    And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation,
the boy said to the girl, `Let's test ourselves--just once.  If we
really are each other's 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere,
we will meet again without fail.  And when that happens, and we know
that we are the 100% perfect ones, we'll marry then and there.  What
do you think?'
    `Yes,' she said, `that is exactly what we should do.'
    And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west.
    The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary.
They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly
were each other's 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they
had ever met.  But it was impossible for them to know this, young as
they were.  The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them
unmercifully.
    One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season's
terrible influenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and
death they lost all memory of their earlier years.  When they awoke,
their heads were as empty as the young D. H. Lawrence's piggy bank.
    They were two bright, determined young people, however, and
through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again
the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as
full-fledged members of society.  Heaven be praised, they became truly
upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to
another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter
at the post office.  Indeed they even experienced love again,
sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love.
    Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was
thirty-two, the girl thirty.
    One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start
the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl,
intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to
west, both along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood
of Tokyo.  They passed each other in the very center of the street.
The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest
moment in their hearts.  Each felt a rumbling in the chest.  And they
knew:
    She is the 100% perfect girl for me.
    He is the 100% perfect boy for me.
    But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their
thoughts no longer had the clarity of fourteen years earlier.  Without
a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd.  Forever.
    A sad story, don't you think?
  -from _On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning_
   by Haruki Murakami

Gould must have known that he was bringing musical performances of
extraordinarily high calibre to his audiences.  They in turn were no
doubt aware of this knowledge on his part, since it is never possible
for persons of extraordinary capabilities to conceal entirely their
sense of special worth; and it is never quite possible for less gifted
people to conceal their resentment of this.  I am not speaking of
arrogance and our actions to it; arrogance is used to hide stupidity
or cowardice or some other kind of inferiority.  I am speaking of the
disturbing currents that flicker when someone shows us something we
might have seen for ourselves if we had been as perceptive as he.
Although we might be grateful for the revelation, we are nevertheless
irritated by it, especially when it was our `normal' limitations that
prevented our seeing it in the first place.  In turn our discomfort is
misinterpreted as resentment by the person who brought us the
revelation, and his response to this is to adopt a protective attitude
of remoteness, which we in our turn misinterpret as arrogance, and we
have a vicious circle.  We rejoice, secretly, when someone set apart
from us in this manner suffers a fall.
  -Geoffrey Payzant on Glenn Gould

Let no one destitute of geometry enter my doors.  -Plato

I grow warm, I begin to feel happy.  There is nothing extraordinary in
this, it is a small happiness of Nausea: it spreads at the bottom of
the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time --- the time of purple
suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants,
spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.
  -Sartre

No one was looked upon as a musician unless he could compose.  Men of
the most mediocre talent had a complete mastery of the technique of
composition.  They laid the foundation of it by copying out
voice-parts, and afterwards a thorough practical education made them
capable of producing serviceable music at quite an early age.  The
system of instruction in that epoch [17th century] cannot at all be
compared with ours, which is almst wholly directed to making
performers; it was at once more practical and had a far loftier ideal.
From the standpont of education, printed music is a Danaus-gift, since
it enables students to escape the elementary instruction given by
copying music.
  - from _J.S. Bach_ by Albert Schweitzer, 1911

Indisputable fact #1: The Technics 1200 SL direct-drive turntable is
the most important musical instrument of the last two-and-a-half
decades.
Indisputable fact #2: Hip hop is the new rock n' roll; today and
tomorrow.
Indisputable fact #3: Eric B. & Rakim are the most influential DJ/MC
combo in contemporary pop music period.
  -Tom Terrell, 1998

Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.
  -Thucydides

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions.  Small
people always do that.  The really great make you feel that you, too,
can become great.
  -Mark Twain

I can now march 25 and 30 miles a day, survive on short rations of
nothing but hardtack, rancid bacon, and cold water, sleep in the woods
in the cold and heavy dew under nothing but an overcoat, and enjoy
myself capitally.
  -Union soldier, during training

Virtutem forma decorat [beauty is the ornament of virtue].  
  - Leonardo da Vinci, inscribed on the back of his portrait of
    Ginevra de' Benci

Monroe Fieldbinder sees psychologist to bounce ideas off him.  One of
Fieldbinder's ideas is that the phenomenon of modern party-dance is
incompatible with self-consciousness, makes for staggeringly
unpleasant situations (obvious resource: Amherst/Mt. Holyoke mixer
'68) for the at all self-conscious person.  Modern party-dance is
simply writhing to suggestive music.  It is ridiculous, silly to watch
and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform.  It is ridiculous, and yet
absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not
want to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and
uncomfortable and self-conscious... in a word, ridiculous.  Right out
of Kafka: the person who does not do the ridiculous thing is the
person who is ridiculous.  (Idea: Kafka at an Amherst/Mt. Holyoke
mixer, never referred to by name, only as `F.K.,' only one not
dancing....)  Modern party-dance as an evil thing.
  -from _The Broom of the System_ by David Foster Wallace

When professors want your opinion, they'll give it to you. -??

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