Filippo Quotes

Every person wishes to know of the proposals, the learned, and the ignorant. The learned understands the work proposed-he understands at least something, partly, or fully-but the ignorant and inexperienced understand nothing, not even when things are explained to them. Their ignorance moves them promptly to anger. They remain in ignorance because they want to show themselves learned, which they are not, and they move the other ignorant crowd to insistence on its own poor waysand to scorn for those who know. (pg. 126) - Filippo Brunelleschi ~ Ross King

It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds. ~ Paul Di Filippo

A Race car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samotracia ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The 'Lord of the Rings' template or the 'Gormenghast' mold. ~ Paul Di Filippo

The compliments you are about to pay could only sadden me, because what you love in our dear peninsula is exactly the object of our hatreds. Indeed, you crisscross Italy only to meticulously sniff out the traces of our oppressive past, and you are happy, insanely happy, if you have the good fortune to carry home some miserable stone on which our ancestors have trodden. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

There must be a rule of thumb in pop-culture archaeology that states that the allure of any topic is inversely related to its assigned importance in the affairs of humanity. The more trivial the subject, the dearer it is to most of its partisans and the more worthy of scholarship. The smallest things in life often mean the most to people. ~ Paul Di Filippo

We say that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed ... Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

You could engineer a human to survive the greenhouse effect because you think that's what's going to happen, and then all of a sudden the glaciers are creeping down on you. ~ Paul Di Filippo

The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate. ~ Paul Di Filippo

War is the highest form of modern art. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

'James and the Giant Peach' magnificently starts out Dahl's career as a blithe and droll Bad Uncle corrupter and affirmer of youth. Its influence can be subsequently traced down the decades in everything from Maurice Sendak to Lemony Snicket to J. K. Rowling. ~ Paul Di Filippo

We must not show to all and sundry the secrets of the waters flowing in ocean and river, or the devices that work on these waters. Let there be convened a council of experts and masters in mechanical art to deliberate what is needed to compose and construct these works. ~ Filippo Brunelleschi

Critics, at least generally, want to regard works of fiction as independent entities, whose virtues and failures must be reckoned apart from the circumstances of their creation, and even apart from the intentions of their creator. ~ Paul Di Filippo

We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

The advent of AIDS circa 1980 has really forced medicine and biology to take enormous steps just for sheer survival. The same way war propels hard technology, AIDS has created wartime conditions in the field of biology that will have all sorts of spin-offs. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe. ~ Paul Di Filippo

War, the world's only hygiene. ~ Filippo Marinetti

At that moment, sitting on that park bench, The Writer was overcome by an indefinable sadness not completely ascribable to the state in which The Mother was now, nor the desperation of his decades-long creative crisis, a sadness so strong he could have peddle it to all the enthusiasts in the world and turned them into depressives, and would still have some left over. Because he no longer knew what to do with so much sadness. And sometimes he didn't even know what to do with himself. ~ Filippo Bologna

More than we sleep, play, or make love, we work. Yet despite - or perhaps because of - this dominant daily grind, much of our literature is biased toward other pursuits. ~ Paul Di Filippo

A new beauty has been added to the splendor of the world - the beauty of speed. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

To disclose too much of one's inventions and achievements is one and the same thing as to give up the fruit of one's ingenuity. ~ Filippo Brunelleschi

Any debut novel is usually a case of spitting into the wind - or, just maybe, casting your bread upon the waters. Without an established audience in place, first-time authors have to hope for resonant word of mouth and a receptive reviewer or three. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Everyone can guess what 'Corn Flakes' tastes like, even if you've never had them. But what, pray tell, does 'High School Musical' or 'Spider-Man' cereal possibly taste like? In this late era, we have reached the ultimate deracination between product image and what actually sits on our spoon. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Stephen King consummately honors several traditions with his rare paperback original, 'Joyland.' He addresses the novel of carny life and sideshows, where the midway serves as microcosm, such as in those famous books by Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney and William Lindsay Gresham. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Certainly the highest posthumous praise that can be conferred upon any writer is the assertion that his or her writing permanently altered the literary landscape for the better, opening new textual doors and engaging new readers. That the author's oeuvre was essential and irreplaceable and transformative. ~ Paul Di Filippo

The science-fictional motif of lethal, infectious information - bad memes - is a fascinating one, with an extended history. One of the earliest instances is Robert W. Chambers's 'The King in Yellow' from 1895. Chambers's conceit is a malevolent play: read beyond Act II, and you go mad. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Jeff VanderMeer's fiction has always been entrancingly, engagingly, enthusiastically weird, a winning combination of mimesis and the fantastical that privileges neither component: perhaps the very definition of that mode categorized as the 'New Weird' and exemplified most famously by the groundbreaking work of China Mieville. ~ Paul Di Filippo

For every reader and writer of steampunk fiction, there are probably hundreds or thousands of other activists who gleefully embrace some non-written manifestation of the steampunk ethos. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation. ~ Paul Di Filippo

The gifts given to us by God must not be relinquished to those who speak ill of them and who are moved by envy or ignorance. ~ Filippo Brunelleschi

We will glorify war-the world's only hygiene, milliterism, patriotism , the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it's a very small percentage of the total. That's been changing in the last few years. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Smellin' the beefaloes and leanpigs turnin' on their spits, holding a cold cheer-beer in my hand, watchin' the stars poppin' out one by one like random pixels on God's antique
monochrome display, listenin' to the joyful chatter of my fellow gips, contemplatin' the easy job ahead of me, I was as near to heaven asI have ever been on this mostly sad ol' earth. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Just as our solar system has a certain idiosyncratic assortment of planets and moons, different from any neighboring system yet categorically equivalent, so each distinct period of human history might have special qualities and individuals, characteristics and events, yet still be essentially akin beneath the surface to all the others. ~ Paul Di Filippo

We had stayed up all night my friends and I beneath mosque lamps hanging from the ceiling. Their brass domes were filigreed, starred like our souls; just as, again like our souls, they were illuminated by the imprisoned brilliance of an electric heart. On the opulent oriental rugs, we had crushed our ancestral lethargy, arguing all the way to the final frontiers of logic and blackening reams of paper with delirious writings. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

I propose to build for eternity. ~ Filippo Brunelleschi

Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views - on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics - than Robert Heinlein. ~ Paul Di Filippo

The past is necessarily inferior to the future. That is how we wish it to be. How could we acknowledge any merit in our most dangerous enemy: the past, gloomy prevaricator, execrable tutor? ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

It is therefore necessary to prepare the imminent and inevitable identification of man with the motor, facilitating and perfecting an incessant exchange of intuition, rhythm, instinct and metallic discipline, quite utterly unknown to the majority of humanity and only divined by the most lucid mind. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Immensely clever and libidinously hilarious.The most astonishing thing about Love in a Dead Language is its ingenious construction. Insofar as any printed volume can lay claim to being a multimedia work, this book earns that distinction. ~ Paul Di Filippo

As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Generally speaking, by the time a subculture such as steampunk secures the attention of major media, resulting in extensive coverage of the craze, said phenomenon is already on the way out. ~ Paul Di Filippo

It's certainly a cliche to remark that a nonfiction book 'reads just like a novel,' but in the case of Jonathan Eig's 'The Birth of the Pill,' I have no other recourse, since his narrative is full of larger-than-life characters sharply limned and embarked on fascinating doings, their story told in sprightly visual fashion. ~ Paul Di Filippo

It was as unsatisfying as a handjob from someone wearing an oven mitt. ~ Paul Di Filippo

O my brother Futurists ! All of you, look at yourselves! ... In the name of that Human Pride we so adore, I proclaim that the hour is nigh when men with broad temples and steel chins will give birth magnificently, with a single trust of their bulging will, to giants with flawless gestures. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

So there are countless reasons to remain on this Godforsaken planet that was long considered the only world, if for no other reason than to learn the end of our story: what the author of our lives has not yet taken the trouble to finish. ~ Filippo Bologna

Idealists , workers of thought, unite to show how inspiration and genius walk in step with the progress of the machine , of aircraft, of industry, of trade, of the sciences, of electricity. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Quite often, intent on conveying how things can go wrong for a culture (science fiction) or an individual (horror) or all of magical creation (fantasy), works of fantastika often preclude comedy, because humor gets in the way of messages of doom or struggle. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Sometimes magnificent visual art takes root in the humblest of soils. Advertisements painted on old barns, tattoos, fruit crate labels, hot rod embellishments - all these media and many other non-galleried forms have hosted and fostered esthetic delights that satisfy any rigorous definition of art. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image. ~ Paul Di Filippo

He was so drunk that he would have stubbornly denied that he was. ~ Filippo Bologna

The constituents of tragedy may be universally acknowledged, easily invoked and deeply felt, but the elements of comedy are, I think, more widely variable from person to person. ~ Paul Di Filippo

The tear is the language of the soul and the voice of the feeling. ~ Filippo Pananti

Many are ready, when listening to the inventor, to belittle and deny his achievements so that he will no longer be heard in honourable places, but after some months or a year, they use the inventor's words in speech or writing or design. ~ Filippo Brunelleschi

The life of matter can be embraced only by an orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous, by means of the most extensive analogies. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Logic, order, truth, reason, we consign them all to the oblivion of death," said one Surrealist manifesto. We must "cultivate the hatred of intelligence," said the leader of the Futurists, Filippo Marinetti, an artist hailed by Mussolini as the John the Baptist of Fascism.17 ~ Leonard Peikoff

I think humanity is not wise enough to know what genotype or somatype is going to be the most successful or the most fit - simply because we're not fully in control of our environment. ~ Paul Di Filippo

When will you disembarrass yourselves of the lymphatic ideology of that deplorable Ruskin, which I would like to cover with so much ridicule that you would never forget it? With his morbid dream of primitive and rustic life, with his nostalgia for Homeric cheeses and legendary wool-spinners, with his hatred for the machine, steam power, and electricity, that maniac of antique simplicity is like a man who, after having reached full physical maturity, still wants to sleep in his cradle and feed himself at the breast of his decrepit old nurse in order to recover his thoughtless infancy. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

The three touchstones that woke Buddha up - sickness, old age, and death - are a pretty good place to start when crafting a tragic tale. And if we need to get more specific: heartbreak, destruction, miscomprehension, natural disasters, betrayal, and the waste of human potential. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Art deals with profound and simple moods ... Let us suppose that the artist - in this instance (the artist )Picabia - gets a certain impression by looking at our skyscrapers, our city, our way of life, and that he tries to reproduce it ... he will convey it in plastic ways on the canvas, even though we see neither skyscrapers nor city on it. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule. ~ Paul Di Filippo

There is no longer beauty except in the struggle. No more masterpieces without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault against the unknown forces in order to overcome them and prostrate them before men. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Gaia giveth even as she taketh away.

The warming of the global climate over the past century had melted permafrost and glaciers, shifted rainfall patterns, altered animal migratory routes, disrupted agriculture, drowned cities, and similarly necessitated a thousand thousand adjustments, recalibrations and hasty retreats. But humanity's unintentional experiment with the biosphere had also brought some benefits.

Now we could grow oysters in New England.

Six hundred years ago, oysters flourished as far north as the Hudson. Native Americans had accumulated vast middens of shells on the shores of what would become Manhattan. Then, prior to the industrial age, there was a small climate shift, and oysters vanished from those waters.

Now, however, the tasty bivalves were back, their range extending almost to Maine.

The commercial beds of the Cape Cod Archipelago produced shellfish as good as any from the heyday of Chesapeake Bay. Several large wikis maintained, regulated and harvested these beds, constituting a large share of the local economy.

But as anyone might have predicted, wherever a natural resource existed, sprawling and hard of defense, poachers would be found. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Thomas Pynchon surely inaugurated or crystallized a new genre in 1963 when he published 'V.' The seriocomic mystery or thriller with one foot set in the present and one in various historical eras received its postmodern baptism from Pynchon. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Spaghetti is no food for fighters, ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Every Luke Skywalker needs his Darth Vader. ~ Paul Di Filippo

We love the indomitable bellicose patriotism that sets you apart; we love the national pride that guides your muscularly courageous race; we love the potent individualism that doesn't prevent you from opening your arms to individualists of every land, whether libertarians or anarchists. ~ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Madam, I assure you that you are dealing with two gentleman of the highest propriety and social standing.
When one contemplates the deeds that are daily done in society's name, such a description is no high recommendation. ~ Paul Di Filippo