seni sequia

“After all, works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.”

“Your life is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one. That is why it does not cease to be difficult; that is why it will not cease to grow.”

“As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour. And as we blend, sight, the sovereign sense and concept’s chief content, blurs. ‘The lover,’ Rilke wrote, ‘is in such splendid danger just because he [or she] must depend upon the coordination of his [or her] senses, for he [or she] knows that they must meet in that unique and risky centre, in which, renouncing all extension, they come together and have no permanence.’”

“What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is livable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.”

“…the body is not merely matter but a continual and incessant /materializing/ of possibility.”

“To be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not.”

“Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”

“We have to be clear about what we mean by freedom, since from the beginning freedom has been, not the same as the liberty that belongs to the individual, but something socially conditioned and socially shared. No one person is free when others are not, since freedom is achieved as a consequence of a certain social and political organization of life. […] What does it mean when the notion of freedom has been twisted to ratify discrimination, xenophobia, racism, and nationalism? […] It is one thing for the state to value freedom of expression and to protect expression, but it is quite another for the state to be the agent who decides whose freedom of expression will be protected and whose will not.”

“One finds that love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.”

“This is our failure, that in all the world / Only the stricken have learned how to grieve.”

Love, after all, is the ingredient that separates a sacrifice from ordinary, everyday butchery.

“A good or great writer may refuse to accept any responsibility or morality that society wishes to impose on her. Yet the best and greatest of them know that if they abuse this hard-won freedom, it can only lead to bad art. There is an intricate web of morality, rigor, and responsibility that art, that writing itself, imposes on a writer. It’s singular, it’s individual, but nevertheless it’s there. At its best, it’s an exquisite bond between the artist and the medium. At its acceptable end, it’s sort of a sensible cooperation. At its worst, it’s a relationship of disrespect and exploitation.”