On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
The same is true of what we write: it walks and it talks, but it can be dead-alive or alive-alive. What is truly alive stops before nothing and ceaselessly seeks answers to absurd, "childish" questions. Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken — errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow's stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.
Source: You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment
The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914) The Purple Wig
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)
Death-And After http://books.google.co.in/books?id=0tIQ-MGW6F8C&pg=PA19, p. 19
“The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes”
139
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
“Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.”
