Rita

He [Nabokov] also reminds us of the main reason it is so hard [for us to notice that other people are suffering]: we all spend a lot of time inventing people rather that noticing them, reshaping real people into characters in stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, stories about how beautiful and rare we are.

Desire is not form, but a procedure, a process.

The brain is not only a corporeal organ but also the inductor of another invisible, incorporeal, and metaphysical surface on which all events are inscribed and symbolized.

Adjectives throw us sideways, off-course — seductive, bifurcating, diverted. Literally parasitic, like static: surplus noise, beside the master devouring the substantive master’s share; blood-sucker. Adverbs cause action to deviate, to lose its balance. Both denote circumstances, limit and bring the act, person or thing into existence. A small deviation begins with corners, moments, qualities or restrictions, weather conditions; why don’t we take our time? So rare and precious, often enslaved, miraculously freed, superb, ecstatic, never monotonous, beside us, far away, secret, available, rich, full, tasty, free, mixed.

What is peculiar about the signs I and you is that they are essentially empty of meaning except when they are being used. So the reality to which I or you refers is solely a reality of discourse. They refer to nothing but the fact that someone is speaking or has spoken….Language is not something the human subject uses (as Rene Descartes and the traditions of modernity that follow his lead had always asserted), but rather, the human subject is something only made possible by language.