17 Quotes by Josip Novakovich

The basis for the feminist movement was a striving for equality between the sexes. Women can write erotica; therefore, men can write erotica. Or rather, we are allowed to; whether we can is a different issue.

Enemies keep you alert, competitive, and friendships lull you into mediocrity, and through peer pressure, keep you back and down, and eventually, down and out. Some of the most excellent friends I knew in my hometown became alcoholics, and true enough, they are fun to talk with, telling jokes and anecdotes, but they sacrificed their lives to their friendships, proving that they were fun, that they were not betraying friends by leaving hometown for large cities and countries and professions.

When fatness was an exception, it was part of the canon of beauty. Now that leanness is an exception, its symptoms are canonized.

I was caught between the crossfire of the atheist school and a Baptist church and family. Both had a prescription for how I was supposed to think and behave. On most points, they actually agreed. I was supposed to be clean, have short hair, talk modestly, listen and obey, never fight. Consequently, I was slovenly, grew long hair, and fought every day.

Strangely enough, I am beginning to feel like an exile when I go to a polling station in PA and people hold placards approving attacking Middle Eastern countries, supporting the troops. Imagine if in Nazi Germany people said, Look, we know the war is wrong, but we love our boys and we support them. It’s the wrong time to withhold our support now that they are struggling for German ideals, defending Auschwitz. The comparison is extreme, but why support the troops in an unsupportable war?

I was taught not to distinguish between patriotism and nationalism; the word patriotism was an attempt to present the same ugly nationalist phenomenon of favoring your country over others; patriotism was a patriarchal swindle that made it easy to recruit soldiers to shed the blood of other peoples.

Something in the movement of fingers on the keyboard enhances thought. Fingers pull your thoughts forward. Fingers are in some way an extension of your brain, with a lot of cortex associations at their trigger. Get them going!

Countries change, of course, and it is still the same country, in a way, resembling a McCarthy America, except that McCarthy’s America was not in debt. This is a bankrupt America, bankrupted partly by its suspicions and overspending on the military and over-reliance on consumerism.