June 2012
22 posts
Brazil has novel idea to cut jail sentences →
clementineford:
winifredjay:
Brazil will offer inmates in its crowded federal prison system a novel way to shorten their sentences: four days less for every book they read.
Inmates in four prisons holding some of Brazil’s most notorious criminals will be able to read up to 12 works of literature, philosophy, science or classics to trim a maximum 48 days off their sentence each year.
Prisoners...
‘This is the last time’, I muttered for the eighth time.
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
Estragon: I can't go on like this.
Vladimir: That's what you think.
ersatz
yourwordoftheday:
\AIR-sahts; UR-sats\ [adjective]
Being a substitute or imitation, usually an inferior one
History & Origin
Ersatz (1875) derives from German Ersatz, “units of the army reserve,” literally “compensation, replacement, substitute,” from ersetzen “to replace,” from Old High German irsezzen, from setzen “to set.”
Usage
“Many early gamers chose to exist primarily in this...
fried. my head is full of black dust.
“Maybe the dingo ate your baby.”
– Sylvia Plath (via incorrectsylviaplathquotes)
the last time i got enough sleep was making up for having none.
Best Author-on-Author Insults in History
Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: [Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling: How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.
H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw: An idiot child screaming in a hospital.
Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen: Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner: Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
W. H. Auden on Robert Browning: I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.
Mark Twain on Jane Austen: Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: That's not writing, it's typing.
“This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d...”
– Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (via honeyforthehomeless)
