Quotes About Paradox

But already there is some ambiguity, for does black designate a "color" that does not reflect light (and if so, why label it a color?), or does black designate the "color" that results in the total absence of light? Without light, no color, and without color, there is only black – and yet black is not a color.

For every un-universe, then, an un-philosophy that must also negate itself.

Is there yet another meaning of "black" beyond this? There is, but it is a difficult thought to think, and nearly impossible to know, though it does exist (actually it doesn't exist, though the thought of its not-existing does).

A saying from the Desert Fathers reads: "It is frightening to die, it is even more perilous to live a long life." If only pessimism had the devotion of the ascetics.

Bartleby's paradox: acceptance through refusal.

Who knows but life be that which men call death,And death what men call life?

Buddhism needs its fucking Nietzsche --

And guess what he finds. Nothing. And I mean that literally. Not a de Brogliesque absence of presence but a Tertullian presence of absence.

Voters, like history, are under no obligation to make sense.

Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.

My parents are like religious atheists.

You cross me, I'm going to hurt you. But I'm really very gentle.

Life is itself an occupational hazard. Sometimes the things we love hurt us. Embracing and navigating around that contradiction is part of what it is to be alive.

Hypocrisy is great fodder for comedy.

And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?

I want to explore the borders between being a genius and being an idiot.

You can die of the cure before you die of the illness.

I like both antireligious and traditional Catholic imagery.

Doubts are like stains on a shirt. I like shirts with stains, because when I'm given a shirt that's too clean, one that's completely white, I immediately start having doubts.

It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic attraction.

It is a fundamental impossibility to have a magazine that is anarchic and yet formulaic. Those can't coincide.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

It is certain because it is impossible.

An increase in light gives an increase in darkness.