“For it seemed to me that much more truth could be found in the reasonings which a man makes concerning matters that concern him than in those which some scholar makes in his study about speculative matters.”
– Rene Descartes
“For it seemed to me that much more truth could be found in the reasonings which a man makes concerning matters that concern him than in those which some scholar makes in his study about speculative matters.”
– Rene Descartes
“The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.”
– Karl Marx
“Even if Freud himself expresses the hope that someday biological science will confirm and build on his insights, this just shows that he doesn’t understand fully the nature of his own theory. The lasting value of psychoanalysis depends on the fact that no scientific discovery will ever confirm its validity. To hope for this is to abandon the project, even if unwittingly.”
– Todd McGowan, Embracing Alienation
“Because subjectivity is always alienated, far from mastering the world, it is necessarily in a skewed relation to the world. To be a subject is always to relate to one’s world from a distance.”
– Todd McGowan, Embracing Alienation
“Every movement seems not so much choreographed as the result of a very specific decision she has made just at that moment.”
– Stacey D’Erasmo on Valda Setterfield
“We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theatre has been created to teach us that first of all.”
– Antonin Artaud
“We need to go back to, somehow, publishing each other and ourselves. And sometimes publishing books, when we can, but knowing that’s not where the community happens.”
“Chaque forêt est un mystère. Chaque nuit ne connaît pas de lendemain.”
– David Clerson, Mon fils ne revint que sept jours
“Something is taking its course, engorged with time, making his body a total wound.”
– Herbert Blau, “Barthes and Beckett”
Once I thought that art would save me and it did not. Now I do not know what to do with myself. I do not know how. I did not expect any of this. I am at a loss.
“Bookshelves are both the sepulchres which the dead poets haunt and the aeternal gardens where they live and grow, passed into text that respires when we read.”
– Olchar E. Lindsann
“I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things—things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way of paying the price for saying or seeing things.”
– Norman O. Brown
“He had no interest in the art of modernity, let alone contemporary works. But it would be inconceivable for him to consider that his unshakable belief in his own good taste was nothing more than a rigid wall protecting him from the chaos of life itself.”
– Ayşegül Savaş, White on White
“You start with the sentence and the sentence finds out where it is going and you go on from there.”
– Edwin Frank, Stranger than Fiction
I do not know what it is to feel rested anymore. I took a week off from work, to rest, and I do not understand what is happening to me. There is something reassuringly familiar to being wound tight. This, whatever it is, is all very strange.
“I believe in people who are nervous and whose hands shake a little.”
– Deborah Levy
“I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”
– Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living
The magnificent idiocy of desire. How it is so mewlingly stupid, how it is flush with such inexhaustible faith.
“You’re special and you’re also an idiot. That’s how it feels to be a writer. That’s how it feels to be an artist.”
“No, I was not trapped in the wrong body. I was trapped in the wrong universe. In order to become who I was, I had to break the world open.”
– Rachel Pollack
“No. I mean something much more basic. What I felt, what I desired was unspeakable because, for me at least, the words did not exist.”
– Rachel Pollack
“There are creatures in the walls. We hear them scurry and scratch, gnaw on the insulation, tangle the wiring. At night they write poems on tiny typewriters about how they hear creatures outside the walls.”
– Stuart Ross, The Sky is a Sky in the Sky
“I don’t know if I’m real when I’m not being touched”
– Natalie Wee, Beast at Every Threshold
“‘He is dying,’ I said. She came with me to the bed and saw that he was dead. She said as if in wonderment: ‘How quickly it has all passed.'”
– Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“But I know this creature. I know the precise frequency where art stops explaining itself and starts eating you alive.”
– Sophie, The Tumblr-like Allure of Bill Skarsgård