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Very hard to put the vulgar and common sufferings on paper. I use “vulgar and common” in the sense of belonging to many, frequently, everlastingly occurring. The misery of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the telling, in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Pleasant to be pierced by the daggers at the end of paragraphs.

Elizabeth Hardwick

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this Angela Carter quote is driving me wild

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George Saunders on Grace Paley

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George Saunders on Grace Paley

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😭 (source: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/jon-fosses-search-for-peace)

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“Human subjectivity, in all its uniqueness - what Guattari calls its ‘singularity’ - is as endangered as those rare species that are disappearing from the planet every day. It is up to us to resist this mass-media homogenization, which is both desingularizing and infantalizing, and instead invent new ways to achieve the resingularization of existence. It is not enough to take to the streets and wave placards, an entire mental ecology is necessary in order not to give IWC our unconscious assent.”

— Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, from the translators�� introduction to The Three Ecologies by Felix Guattari

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At a time when sociologists and even theologians were extolling the arrival of the ‘secular city’ and the demise of an integrated religious worldview, Ernest Becker anticipated current ‘post-secular’ social theory in law and philosophy by insisting that all cultural worldviews are essentially ‘sacred’ in character, and that the choice was not between the sacred and the secular, but rather between religio-cultural visions that exacted differing tolls on human freedom and community, and demanded differing sacrifices of scapegoats required to keep us from focusing on the inevitable mystifications of the system.

—Daniel Leichty’s introduction to The Ernest Becker Reader

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It is obvious that in the course of his practice a doctor will come across people who have a great effect on him too. He meets personalities who, for better or worse, never stir the interest of the public and who nevertheless, or for that very reason, possess unusual qualities, or whose destiny it is to pass through unprecedented developments and disasters. Sometimes they are persons of extraordinary talents, who might well inspire another to give his life for them; but these talents may be implanted in so strangely unfavorable a psychic disposition that we cannot tell whether it is a question of genius or of fragmentary develop-ment. Frequently, too, in this unlikely soil there flower rare blossoms of the psyche which we would never have thought to find in the fatlands of society.

memories, dreams, reflections by c. g. jung

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“It is better to write of things one believes one knows something about than to anguish in high despair over the manifold difficulties of knowing things at all. And better as well, having taken the plunge, to allow oneself to enjoy it.”

Isaiah Berlin, quoted in “Wisdom Sits in Places,” by Keith Basso (p. 111)

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"[Sometimes] we are deprived of these attachments and find ourselves adrift, literally dislocated, in unfamiliar surroundings we do not comprehend and care for even less. On these unnerving occasions, sense of place may assert itself in pressing and powerful ways, and its often subtle components--as subtle, perhaps, as absent smells in the air or not enough visible sky--come surging into awareness. It is then we come to see that attachments to places may be nothing less than profound, and that when these attachments are threatened we may feel threatened as well."

--Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache

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"In this convulsive age of uprooted populations and extensive diasporas, holding onto places--and sensing fully the goodness contained therein--has become increasingly difficult, and in years to come, it may everywhere be regarded as a privilege and a gift."

--Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (1996)

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"[George Eliot was preoccupied with] how and why to be good in a world she believed was without God but not therefore without moral principles or obligations... [Her novels are] experiments in comprehension, not templates for action, and their greatest gifts to us are the process of thinking that they model."

--Rohan Maitzen, Widening the Skirts of Light: Essays on George Eliot

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“As though to keep his feelings in check, he had come to think of the world in absurdly facile terms.”

Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy and its Dilemmas

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--Elizabeth Hardwick

"If you care about words you learn quite early in life that it is evil to lie."

--Wayne Koestenbaum