By Harvey Blume

Some quotes to keep in mind for the New Year.

Berenice Abbott, Portrait of Jean Cocteau, 1927, printed 1982. Photo: Clark Art Institute

She was 100 pounds of pure, apodictic muscle, her eyes tawny, her white whiskers jutting from her cheek pads like porcupine quills, her teeth as thick as thumbs. She headed gracefully across the plain, and for many minutes remained in view.
Natalie Angier

I want to move away from the grand religious epics to the great hoard of scurrilous, conniving, mysterious, exciting, comic, bizarre, surreal, and very often extremely sexy narratives contained in the rest of the Eastern storehouse, because they show how much pleasure is to be gained from literature once God is removed from the picture.
Salman Rushdie

Sure the fight was fixed. I fixed it with my right hand.
George Foreman

In France, Lucian Freud’s art was regarded as at best an oddity, serving a general French suspicion that this is simply what the Brits look like without their clothes, and why they should put them back on.
Adam Gopnik

“It’s a big hit to your dignity the first time you have to squat down in a field or by the side of the road,” said Raven Drake, until recently homeless. “Slowly you take these hits to your dignity, and one day you don’t even think you’re a person anymore.”
Nicholas Kristof

The appetite for vengeance was insatiable.
Philip Roth could not get enough of getting even.
David Remnick

Everything one achieves in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving.
Jean Cocteau

There are people who hate geometry, who tell me geometry was the moment math stopped making sense to them. Others tell me it was the only part of math that made sense to them. Geometry is the cilantro of math.
Jordan Ellenberg

In certain young people today I find  dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence;  a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

I find it obscene.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What China does to the Tibetans and Uyghurs makes Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians (while lamentable) seem minor. Where is the BDS for China, one wonders?
Andrew Sullivan

It’s all the wrong people talking about God. So it’s hardly surprising no one believes anymore.
Karl Ove Knausgaard

Whatever the source is, the thing that has shaken life up for you, it’s distress that generates art.
Paul Auster

The trouble is just that we have a bad habit of “considering happiness as something rather stupid.”
Ursula Le Guin

ABBA singer Agnetha Fältskog is clearly sick of her Zin-up status: “I’m not only a sexy bottom, you know,” she complains.

For me the highway, the asphalt paths, the thieves, contaminated skies like a suffocating cloak of mangy fur, the millions in their boroughs — that is truly home.
Vivian Gornick

See, it’s running away. Spiders are afraid of us. But Lizzie was not reassured. She’s remained that way: beneath every bland surface there’s bound to be something with too many legs.
Margaret Atwood

Harvey Blume is an author—Ota Benga: The Pygmy At The Zoo—who has published essays, reviews, and interviews widely, in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Agni, The American Prospect, and The Forward, among other venues. His blog in progress, which will archive that material and be a platform for new, is here. He contributes regularly to The Arts Fuse, and wants to help it continue to grow into a critical voice to be reckoned with.