Modernism Quotes

“The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Authoritarian high-modernist states in the grip of a self-evident (and usually half-baked) social theory have done irreparable damage to human communities and individual livelihoods. The danger was compounded when leaders came to believe, as Mao said, that the people were a “blank piece of paper” on which the new regime could write.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Those deserted lines of love and pain 
kept your love wandering
 - and by that alive - 
so that one day 
some restless thought 
would stumble upon your eternity.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“Some break their hearts themselves
only to be healed of the wrong love faster.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“Don't ever let the scars on your heart define the way you love. ”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“Time means nothing when you are in love.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“You can only hold onto a soul forever when you touched it with all your heart.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“My love is so fragile; and still it chooses your hands to bloom.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“The Le Corbusian city was designed, first and foremost, as a workshop for production. Human needs, in this context, were scientifically stipulated by the planner. Nowhere did he admit that the subjects for whom he was planning might have something valuable to say on this matter or that their needs might be plural rather than singular. Such was his concern with efficiency that he treated shopping and meal preparation as nuisances that would be discharged by central services like those offered by well-run hotels. Although floor space was provided for social activities, he said almost nothing about the actual social and cultural needs of the citizenry.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“Once the desire for comprehensive urban planning is established, the logic of uniformity and regimentation is well-nigh inexorable. Cost effectiveness contributes to this tendency. Just as it saves a prison trouble and money if all prisoners wear uniforms of the same material, color, and size, every concession to diversity is likely to entail a corresponding increase in administrative time and budgetary cost. If the planning authority does not need to make concessions to popular desires, the one-size-fits-all solution is likely to prevail.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“In my education it seemed I was always being told to mistrust plot as a phony conceit that betrayed and warped literary art. This, of course, is total bullshit, one of the more useless remnants of so-called modernism. The truth is that life breaks down into plot quite neatly when we choose to see it that way, and narrative is one of the most fundamental human instincts there is.”
― Nic Pizzolatto

“I mean it will be a melancholy relic of the only period in all human history when people were proud of being modern. For though today is always today and the moment is always modern, we are the only men in all history who fell back upon bragging about the mere fact that today is not yesterday.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Selected Essays

“I’m starving of myself.”
― Laura Chouette

“Art: an earnest love for an immortal lie.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“It is okay if you change every once in a while; even the sky needs to let go of its stars
to give the sun a home for a while.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“A sea of unspoken words; waiting for a reason to meet the shore for the first time.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“Love is a delicate suffering.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“Some hearts will never burn as bright as the memories do.”
― Laura Chouette

“I missed so many chances to meet the right one
by missing you too much.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“The most beautiful solitude I ever felt
was when I got lost 
in something I once loved.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“Let your love bleed all over those pages; 
in the end, all it can be is a work of art 
(- but never a mistake).”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“Some bury their feelings 
in the hope that flowers bloom;
(and too many of us die 
while waiting forever).”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“The mountains fell in love
 with the sky - 
while knowing the ocean 
is much nearer; 
and still, 
they loved it the same.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“Simple feelings surviving
while everything else breaks so fast -
touching the edges 
just to feel something.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“I wanted to write about someone I miss - 
and even the ink refused to remember -
so, in the end, I was left 
with nothing but empty pages;
with the greatest words in my mind.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“Free speech, rightly understood is a lesser form of combat intended to preserve peace, which is to say, a form of invasive coercion that cannot be otherwise. It is combat with purpose, with social utility, and its value is social. In other words it is a contingent liberty designed to have a social benefit. But in the modern context it is reinterpreted individualistically, so that it becomes a special prerogative of individuals which they claim for themselves alone without regard to any social good. Free speech is ‘my right’ and is defended not because it is better for everyone in the long run but because it is something I am allowed to do and no one can stop me.”
― Daniel Schwindt, This Dark Age - 2024 Edition - Volume 2: The Confrontation Between Man and Evil

“I like youth, and I like the real newness, which always seems to me to be a development out of the old—not a bombshell. But I'm not sure that some of the writers who are claiming those qualities today are as new and young as the elderly critics tell us. I feel surest of my young writers when I don't hear their joints creaking with the strain to be new.
...
"We must remember how badly Keats and Shelley were treated in their day, mustn't we?"

"But the Della Cruscans, who were really bad, were sat upon, too, weren't they?" said Miss Bird. "And, after all, your argument would apply to bosh as well as to beautiful things."

"Victorian, Miss Bird, Victorian," said Basil, wagging a playful finger at her. He had never heard of the Della Cruscan poets, but it was one of his principles never to give himself away in such things. "The conventional mind is the enemy, you know, in this country. I always admire that fellow—what's his name—who dedicated his book in those six words: 'To the British Public, these pearls!' We must think for ourselves. We mustn't be too conventional, you know."

"But—that's exactly—I don't want to think what the fashion of the moment and the newspapers tell me I ought to think. At least, I don't want to do it mechanically. And I don't mean what you think I mean," stammered poor Miss Bird, blushing and puzzled at her inability to penetrate that superior armor with a perfectly sound and pointed weapon. The Helmstone debates had not yet taught her that you cannot argue with an alleged "modern" who is so pleased with himself (and so ancient a type) that he waives your own remarks and hears nothing but his own blood purring in his ears.”
― Alfred Noyes, The Sun Cure

“You remember the 'distinguished' poem that was quoted in the copy you lent to me?

"They ordered bacon
And eggs at seven.
At eight o'clock,
There was nobody down.
Only the coffeepot
Stood on the table."
"Yes, but what possible ..."

"Do you also remember what your 'distinguished' weekly said about it? 'The old-fashioned reader who would dismiss as insignificant this new and vital work (a striking example of the sharp-edged imagisme with which the more adventurous of our younger writers are experimenting today)'—you see, Basil, I have it by heart, words, tone, cadence and all—'forgets that every object, even the coffeepot on the table, has a perimeter which not only encloses that object, but also subtends a physical and metaphysical otherness that includes the whole of the rest of the universe. Such work, therefore, is more truly significant of ultimate reality than all the pantings after God of the Victorians.'
...
you were squashing a perfectly genuine love of simple and true things in a perfectly genuine little woman, and that the words you borrowed for the purpose were muddle-headed and insincere drivel.
...
They are not literary grounds. They are human grounds. Miss Bird, as I told you, is unlike your 'distinguished' anonymities in having a few quite genuine beliefs; and you used the cheap phrases of a pseudo-metaphysical charlatan, in a precious literary weekly, to snub her. I saw the hurt look on her face long after you had wiped your boots on her perfectly sincere love of certain perfectly true and simple things.
...
I don't go to church to hear a high-brow Anglican curate quoting a Scandinavian lunatic, any more than I go to my hair-dresser's to hear a Christy minstrel reciting the Apostles' Creed. I know that it's all very noble and distinguished and broad-minded and generally newspaperish. You might have been brought up in a seminary for young ladies of fashion.
...
He didn't know whether he was modern or antique. In either case, it appeared he was a fraud.”
― Alfred Noyes, The Sun Cure

“...if he could only break away from this pseudo-modernity, and pseudo-intellectualism; if he could just once defy his own age, instead of defying the dead Victorians; if he could only shock the vicar (who reads Proust) by quoting Longfellow (one doesn't put him on the mountaintops, of course, but there's better stuff than Proust ever dreamed of in the sonnets on Dante); I should feel that he was really his own self, instead of a variation on a current theme. It seems to me that if you really like a person, you want him above everything to be his own self
...
One does get so sick of the notion of the present moment—that, because its conventions aren't those of the last century, it has no conventions of its own. The conventionalists of today all seem to forget that the conventions of yesterday were equally different from those of the day before yesterday.”
― Alfred Noyes, The Sun Cure

“I long to get away, sometimes, from my own generation. I don't care whether it's into the past, or into the future, so long as it's away from the patter into simple realities again. I hate being a slave to my own age.
...
We are so afraid of sentimentality that we're losing the power of human feeling. Our writers today understand all the brutalities and cynicisms; but how many of them understand the simple human affections that hold decent human beings together and make the world worth living in?”
― Alfred Noyes, The Sun Cure