“I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.” —Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept—our own selves—that we love.” —Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“The availability heuristic sheds light on the power of storytelling. As every writer knows, stories are often far more compelling than scientific data. If you doubt that, just ask a wolf. Wolves pose a trivial danger to humans: the number of verifiable, fatal attacks by wolves on humans is exceedingly low. And yet, fear of wolves runs deep. Part of the explanation is certainly that there are so many stories about big, bad wolves eating, e.g., little girls’ grandmothers. As a result of all these stories, the idea of wolves attacking humans is highly salient, which means that people treat it as likely – even though the data establish it is not. Far more dangerous organisms, such as the Salmonella bacterium that kills some 400 people per year in the US alone, do not figure in the public imagination in the same way and consequently are not as feared as they probably should be. The power of storytelling can be harnessed to communicate risk information very effectively, but it can also do immense harm. A single story about an illegal immigrant committing a heinous crime can generate strong anti-immigration sentiments in spite of evidence of the beneficial welfare effects of migration.” —Erik Agner, A Course in Behavioral Economics
“One cannot help but feel that Foucault has wilfully suppressed the fact that since the 1730s the most common French term for homosexual has been pederast rather than sodomite, a clear indication that it was recognized as a secular cultural identity rather than biblical sinful behaviour.” —Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity
“The Hebrew ruah, like the Greek pneuma, means both wind or breath and soul or spirit. Only in God are breath and spirit, speech and thought, absolutely identical; man can always be duplicitous, his speech can be other than his thought.” —Jacques Derrida
“One must always search for the desire of the line, where it wishes to enter or where to die away…. No lines can go wild; every line must have its function…. All the lines must close around a center; otherwise your drawing cannot exist as a unity, for these fleeing lines carry the attention away—they do not arrest it.” —Henri Matisse
“To be black is also to be other to the European Middle Ages, and this fact has had major implications for the construction of modernity and the place of race in it. It is but a short hop from imagining blackness as other in the Middle Ages to imagining it as absent in the period altogether.
“If blackness is not present in the European Middle Ages, then the evidence of black people’s abiding presence in modernity – when black people write, appear in the television and radio media or, at the very least, board trains with the rest of us – means that they must be exclusively modern.” —Cord J. Whitaker, “Race-ing the dragon: the Middle Ages, race and trippin’ into the future”
“Even the most beneficial presence casts a shadow. Mythologically, having no shadow means being of another world, not being fully human. To live with our shadow is to understand how human beings live at a frontier between light and dark and to approach the central difficulty: that there is no possibility of a lighted perfection in this life; that the attempt to create it is often the attempt to be held unaccountable, to be the exception, to be the one who does not have to be present or participate, and therefore does not have to hurt or get hurt. To cast no shadow on others is to vacate the physical consequences of our appearance in the world. Shadow is a beautiful, inverse confirmation of our incarnation.” —David Whyte, “Shadow”
“Diogenes raised himself up a little when he saw so many persons coming towards him, and fixed his eyes upon Alexander. And when that monarch addressed him with greetings, and asked if he wanted anything, ‘Yes,’ said Diogenes, ‘stand a little out of my sun.’” —Plutarch’s Life of Alexander
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
“For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections?” —Claire Messud in The Paris Review
“A writer sits in her writing space, setting aside the time to be alone with her work. Is she inspired doing it? Very possibly not. Is she distracted, bored, lonely, in need of stimulation? Oh, absolutely, without a doubt it’s hard to sit there. Who wants to sit there? Something nags at the edges of her mind. Should she make soup for dinner tonight? She’s on the verge of jumping up from her chair – in which case all will be lost – but wait. Suddenly she remembers: this is her hour (or two, or three). This is her habit, her job, her discipline. Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.” —Dani Shapiro