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Thirty quotations on failure.

“Alas for man! Alas for all thy dreams,
Thou great somnambulist, wherein, outlawed
From right and thought, thou workest out unawed
Thy grand fantastic fancies! Thro’ the flood,
The pestilence, the whirlwind, the dread plain
Of thunders—thro’ the earthquake and the storm,
The deluge and the snows, the whirling ice
Of the wild glacier, every ghastly form
Of earth’s most vexed vicissitudes of pain,—
Thro’ worlds of fire and seas of mingled bloods
Thou rushest, dreadful as a maniac god;
And only finding that thou wert not sane
When some great sorrow thunders at thy brain
And wakes thee trembling by a precipice.”

—Sydney Dobell

"A good way to think about the output of LLMs is not an instance. It’s not actually a concrete piece of writing. The sentences aren’t sentences."

no aboutness · newbie
nattering while clouds batter
each paradox patchwork
i perne upon urn's castle
herethunderhymn thronging
hedgegimp lesson crimp squandered
& little stars staring

The Library, November 2025.