A Quote by Penelope Gilliatt
jokes are ideally pleasurable. They are an act of assassination without a corpse, a moment of total annihilation that paradoxically makes anything possible.
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I had a moment where I was onstage once... As a comedian, you just think, 'Be funny as possible all the time - like, funny at all costs - jokes, jokes, jokes.' That's how my mentality was.
There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.
You wish they understood, as you do, that there is no escape and never was, that from the moment two cells combined to become one they were doomed. You wish they understood that there is joy in this fact, greater joy and love in just this one last moment than they experienced in the entirety of their lives. Because even in this last moment there is still Everything, whole galaxies and eons, the sum total of every experience across time, shrunk to the head of a pin, theirs for the asking, right here, right now. And so anything, anything, anything is possible.
To fight is to face death once more, perhaps the total annihilation of their kind. But to run... is that not also a kind of annihilation?
Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.
The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.
Art alone makes life possible - this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms...
Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done.
Service is a prerequisite for anything relating to luxury. That makes it (shopping) sensual and pleasurable.
I'm never happier when writing than when I see gags taking shape - ideally, gags at my own expense. What I like is the shuttling back and forth, serious into comedy and vice-versa, ideally, both in the same sentence, or even simultaneously. The best jokes are always ideas in miniature.
The way I miss my daughter Esme is to worry about her. It is not a pleasurable longing. It contorts my body and scrambles my brain, makes me stop breathing, clench my jaw and my fists, it makes me frown, and makes me blind and deaf, in fact entirely without sensory perception.
It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.
Have you seen this video of these cows who have been in a dairy farm, a really shitty one, their entire lives, and they're let out into a field, and they're literally jumping with joy? It's crazy. I don't have any trouble completely becoming that cow. There's no "What is it really like to be a cow?" kind of question anymore. There's no question at that moment whether I understand you completely. I think there is, in that moment, a possible total sympathy. Total sharing.
NIRVANA- In the Buddhist religion, a state of pleasurable annihilation awarded to the wise, particularly to those wise enough to understand it.
You choose how to feel and act every moment of every day. The moment you accept this responsibility completely, you gain total control over your life.
Lincoln, answering friends who advised him to seek protection against assassination: "If they kill me the next man will be just as bad for them. In a country like this, where our habits are simple, and must be, assassination is always possible, and will come if they are determined upon it.
I use mother-in-law jokes, kid jokes, tax jokes - anything that works.
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