Favorite passages, quotes, poems

“You get used to a condition of longing. Live with it over time and it becomes part of your household—“

– Laurie Colwin

“Work (in the form of leisure as well) invades all of life as a fundamental repression, as control, and as a permanent job in specified times and places, according to an omnipresent code. People must be positioned at all times: in school, in the plant, at the beach or in front of the TV, or in job retraining — a permanent, general mobilization. But this form of labor is no longer productive in the original sense: it is now merely the mirror of society, its imaginary, its fantastic principle of reality. A death instinct perhaps.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)

Even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible.

— Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be

"It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are."

- Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire

There are people who are so full of common sense that they haven't the slightest cranny left for their own sense.

-Miguel Unamuno

The melancholic not only maintains the lost object in hallucinatory persistence, but congeals language itself into a corpselike thing: words and even the diacritical accents punctuating these become magical fetish objects, stripped of symbolic efficacy - no longer a substitute for the thing but perversely identified with it- which hover in the mouth as frozen, inassimilable remainders. Is Hegel a mourner or a melancholic?

- Rebecca Comay

“[V]iolence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action.”

— Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (translated by Alphonso Lingis)

“There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.”

— George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation

“Everything that shelters behind the dignity of any profession, is always this central lack which is impotence.”

-Lacan

“the subject is always implied in his objects”

-Lacan

To everything which a man allows to become visible, one is able to demand: what does he wish to hide?

-Jean Copjec

Always falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one; sometimes falling into a hole within a hole, or many holes within holes, getting out of them one after the other, then falling again, saying “this is not your grave, get out of the hole”; sometimes being pushed, saying “you can not push me into this hole, it is not my grave,” and getting out defiantly, then falling into a hole again without any pushing; sometimes falling into a set of holes whose structures are predictable, ideological, and long dug, often falling into this set of structural and impersonal holes; sometimes falling into holes with other people, with other people, saying “this is not our mass grave, get out of this hole,” all together getting out of the hole together, hands and legs and arms and human ladders of each other to get out of the hole that is not the mass grave but that will only be gotten out of together; sometimes the willful-falling into a hole which is not the grave because it is easier than not falling into a hole really, but then once in it, realizing it is not the grave, getting out of the hole eventually; sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another; sometimes surveying the landscape of holes and wishing for a high quality final hole; sometimes thinking of who has fallen into holes which are not graves but might be better if they were; sometimes too ardently contemplating the final hole while trying to avoid the provisional ones; sometimes dutifully falling and getting out, with perfect fortitude, saying “look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t!

—Anne Boyer, ‘What resembles the grave but isn’t’, 2015

The fantasy the neurotic makes use of is what serves him best in defending himself against anxiety, in keeping a lid on it.

-Lacan

I used to consider absence a lack. And I ignorantly regretted that lack. Today I have nothing to regret. There is no lack in absence. Absence is a presence in me. And I feel it, a perfect whiteness, so close and cozy in my arms that I laugh, dance, and invent glad exclamations, since absence, this embodied absence, can’t be taken away from me.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, tr. by Mark Strand, from “Absence,”

“In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.”

— Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The predominant feeling

of being alive

is survivor’s guilt

[…]

The deep feeling

of climbing the mountain

in stolen shoes

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, from “Alive”

“In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities and there is no joy in things that do not exist.”

—Thomas Merton

“The affect of shame, which is searing, painful, is not – according to psychoanalysis – a feeling of being negatively judged by another but of being intimately attached to something you do not understand and which thus feels alien to you. One of the best relatively recent examples of it is drawn from Robert Antelme’s The Human Race in which there is a scene where a young student is arbitrarily picked out of a line by an S.S. officer and thus chosen for execution. The young boy responds by blushing. What elicits this telltale sign of shame; why this affective response from someone who is about to die? The answer is that the boy feels he has been chosen for a reason, that there is something about him that caused him to be selected; he cannot deny this thing in him, he accepts that it is an intimate part of who he is – but he does not know what it is. This feeling of being tethered to something one cannot assume as one’s own is worse than death. Shame, then, rather than mortal fear is the boy’s response.”

— JOAN COPJEC

it is doubly difficult to break the hold of ideology over the cynic because the cynic believes that she/he has already broken its hold, so that there is nothing further to be known

-ToddMcGowan

ANGEL HILL

Someone must be looking after the headstones.

It might be you with your easel and brushes

And your big sheets and charcoal for drawing

Snowdrop cumulus and lichen lettering.

Someone must be looking after the railings

And closing the rusty gate behind her.

MICHAEL LONGLEY

“I have never been allowed to be holy, / I have never been forgiven for wanting.”

— Gwen Benaway, from “Boys

Once when I went to call on Modigliani, he was out: we had apparently misunderstood one another so I decided to wait several minutes. I was clutching an armful of red roses. A window above the locked gates of the studio was open. Having nothing better to do, I began to toss the flowers in through the window. Then without waiting any longer, I left.

When we met again, he was perplexed at how I had entered the locked room because he had the key. I explained what had happened, "but that’s impossible – they were lying there so beautifully".

— Anna Akhmatova, Memoir of Modigliani

“The real problem is the intellectual’s inaptitude for real life, methodically cultivated through reading, thinking and dialectic. It is deformity by stages, a systematic habituation, day by day, a slow atrophying of the reflexes and instincts, a step-by-step destruction of the natural vital power that allows us to pass untroubled through storms.”

—Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years

The good old days of exploitation, where the boss was interested in the worker only to the extent that they produced a commodity which could be sold at a profit, are long gone. Work then meant the annihilation of subjectivity, your reduction to an impersonal machine-part; it was the price that you paid for time away from work. Now, there is no time away from work, and work is not opposed to subjectivity. All time is entrepreneurial time because we are the commodities, so that any time not spent selling ourselves is wasted time.

— Mark Fisher, “Suffering With a Smile

“Identity is a dream that is pathetically absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better to do. You dream of yourself and gaining recognition when you have lost all singularity. Today we no longer fight for sovereignty or for glory, but for identity. Sovereignty was a mastery; identity is merely a reference. Sovereignty was adventurous; identity is linked to security (and also to the systems of verification which identify you). Identity is this obsession with appropriation of the liberated being, but a being liberated in sterile conditions, no longer knowing what he is. It is a label of existence without qualities. Now, all energies - the energies of minorities and entire peoples, the energies of individuals - are concentrated today on that derisory affirmation, that prideless assertion: I am! I exist! I’m alive, I’m called so-and-so, I’m European! A hopeless affirmation, in fact, since when you need to prove the obvious, it is by no means obvious.”

— Jean Baudrillard - Impossible Exchange