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Quote by Susan Fletcher

Work

The Silver Dark Sea

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Author

Susan Fletcher
Susan Fletcher

Susan Fletcher is an American novelist born in 1979. Her works are acclaimed for their unique narrative style and profound insights into human nature. more

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“In all sorts of markets—music, film, art, and politics—the future of popularity will be harder to predict as the broadcast power of radio and television democratizes and the channels of exposure grow.... The gatekeepers had their day. Now there are simply too many gates to keep.”

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“Nor, if the succession of events exercises a charm, is unpredictability by any means the least part of it. When a forecast is made, no matter what it may be, it is always tempting to prove it wrong. Events themselves often help us out in this regard. There are overpredicted events, for instance, that obligingly decline to occur; and then there are the exactly opposite kind - those which occur without forewarning. It behoves us to bank on such conjunctural surprises - such 'backdraughts'. We must bet on the Witz of events themselves. If we lose, at least we shall have had the satisfaction of defying the objective idiocy of the probabilities. This obligation is a vital function - part of our collective genetic heritage. Indeed, this is the only genuine function of the intellect: to embrace contradictions, to exercise irony, to take the opposite tack, to exploit rifts and reversibility - even to fly in the face of the lawful and the factual. If the intellectuals of today seem to have run out of things to say, this is because they have failed to assume this ironic function, confining themselves within the limits of their moral, political or philosophical consciousness despite the fact that the rules have changed, that all irony, all radical criticism now belongs exclusively to the haphazard, the viral, the catastrophic - to accidental or system-led reversals. Such are the new rules of the game - such is the new principle of uncertainty that now holds sway over all. [...]”

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Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ...”

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Book:The Mark on the Wall
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