The point at which an influx of light meets a book is the true spirit of a library, according to Louis I. Kahn.

• good talk.
• being done.
• Hallowe’en.
• to answer not a word.
• an all-over bath with cool, not cold, water.
• an old-fashioned anise-seed tea.
• to go away from here.
• to be literary.
• just going to sleep.
• to begin again.
• not having to go to school.
• to do nothing.
• unencumbered, untrapped, unchained.
• that it will happen again tomorrow.
• that which must remain unwritten.

[Tidbits gathered through the course of our research.  See the remarkable collection, entitled Bullet Lists.]

Those fun moments when pretzel knots impersonate Aztec glyphs.  Pretzel knot diagrams from "Hyperbolic Pretzel Knots" by Jeffrey Meier.

"Functionally a library … spiritually a sanctuary." —Louis I. Kahn

"Dope, booze, stuff, swill and hate -- and you will have it all right!"  From The Doctors, A Satire in Four Seizures by Elbert Hubbard, 1909.

Here are the marvelous first two pages of an appreciation of our 21st cousin, Emily Dickinson, from The Procession of Masks by Herbert Gorman, 1923.  Gorman suggests that Emily's poems themselves are recluses, that they are unpremeditated footnotes to Emily's solitary life, that they are strange jewels set upon the unobtrusive thread of her days, and that they possess an inborn natural magic that no practice can make possible, since they are "flashes struck into existence by by the contact of an extraordinary mind with life."

It may be statistically true that one isn't the target audience for anything one encounters, but Statistics is pseudoscience (the bad kind; the good ones are the ones ostracized for audaciously resisting the sacred dogmas of Big Science), plus it's a highly alienating philosophy.  A more interesting approach to life would be to consider oneself the target audience for everything and evaluate from there.  The image is from You Are Not The Target Audience by William Gillis (undated).

"A book is tremendously important.  Nobody ever paid for the price of a book, they pay only for the printing.  But a book is actually an offering and must be regarded as such.  If you give honor to the man who writes it, there is something in that which further induces the expressive powers of writing."

—Louis I. Kahn, "I Love Beginnings" lecture, 1972

A true skeptic is skeptical even of the rock-solid.  Note that the author of this book opted for anonymity, for Big Science bullies were as bad in 1877 as they are today.  From Skepticism in Geology by Verifier, 1877.

"What's got to be gotten over is the false idea that an hallucination is a private matter."

• there in front of you, wearing that cunning little yachting cap maybe.
• is never the logical conclusion.
• to point us to the meaning.
• we’re all mortal.
• what it generates.
• luck.
• consciousness.
• that there is no reason for anything.
• nothing more than the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
• that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

"In every event we must, by faith, presume a benign purpose, which, could we see all which is to come, would delight us – we would be especially delighted to see how intrinsically evil events become used as building blocks for noble structures – and are, in fact, essential for the ultimate construction of those fine systems. Nothing is wasted, nothing is futile, nothing is lost. Everything is eventually, when its time has come, is snatched up and incorporated."

Here's a great justification for varnishing the truth, which I'll summarize for your convenience (though of course the original passage is superior):

1. varnish brings out veins of beauty that were otherwise invisible

2. it doesn't actually hide the sober facts of life since it's transparent

3. having penetrated the artifice, the observer's powers of insight are flattered and attention is better secured

4. even the coarsest mundanity has moods in which it's gilded by the light of romance

5. if the storyteller believes in the true gold of those fairy minarets, the story benefits

From Idolatry by Julian Hawthorne, 1874.