On the sadness of nouns

“Writing, Jen thought, seemed like a very sad pursuit. Like painting, but worse. At least paintings had color. Writing, though, was just black marks on paper, standing in for people and objects and events that could never be seen or felt. It seemed pathetic in a way. Nouns were the saddest words of all, trying so hard to summon real objects to life.”

Jon Raymond, “Words and Things” (Livability)

Dostoevsky on the dangers of science

“He was devoured by the deepest and most insatiable passion, which absorbs a man’s whole life and does not, for beings like Ordynov, provide any niche in the domain of practical daily activity. This passion was science. Meanwhile it was consuming his youth, marring his rest at night with its slow, intoxicating poison, robbing him of wholesome food and of fresh air which never penetrated to his stifling corner. Yet, intoxicated by his passion, Ordynov refused to notice it. He was young and, so far, asked for nothing more. His passion made him a babe as regards external existence and totally incapable of forcing other people to stand aside when needful to make some sort of place for himself among them. Some clever people’s science is a capital in their hands; for Ordynov it was a weapon turned against himself.”

From “The Landlady” (1848)

On the value of ignorance

“It is best for the author to be born away from literary centres, or to be excluded from their ruling set if he be born in them. It is best that he starts out with his thinking, not knowing how much has been thought and said about everything.

A certain amount of ignorance will insure his sincerity, will increase his boldness and shelter his genuineness, which is his hope of power.

Not ignorance of life, but life may be learned in any neighborhood;

—not ignorance of the greater laws which govern human affairs, but they may be learned without a library of historians and commentators, by imaginitive sense, by seeing better than by reading;

—not ignorance of the infinitudes of human circumstance, but knowledge of these may come to a man without the intervention of universities;

—not ignorance of one’s self and of one’s neighbor, but innocence of the sophistications of learning, its research without love, its knowledge without inspiration, its method without grace; freedom from its shame at trying to know many things as well as from its pride of trying to know but one thing; ignorance of that faith in small confounding facts which is contempt for large reassuring principles …”

(Woodrow Wilson, “How books become immortal”, 1891)