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“Sleeping in the afternoon was a bad sign. She had been trying not to notice the signs but she could not avoid this one, and a sharp fear contracted her stomach muscles.”

— Joan Didion, from Play It As It Lays

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“…she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between her and other. She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get.”

— Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion

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From Play It As It Lays

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Poem that inspired the MILK TOOTH x MIG jewelry collection.

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...and his abiding sense...that sex, death, and creative fecundity were ineluctably connected.

Sebastian Smee on Picasso

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Barcelona was homecoming. There, among old friends, Picasso was once again the celebrated wunderkind, the brilliant young artist who had so impressed on his home turf that going to Paris, the center of the art world, was his only real option. The intervening five years has not been easy. But now, thanks to the Steins' early interest and Vollard's renewed vote of confidence, he finally had something to show for himself. He was happy to see family and old acquaintances again, and proud to show off his new love, Olivier. The visit was reassuring: It bolstered his faltering sense of himself.

Sebastian Smee

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...and I can only stay with a man if I believe I am loved.

Fernande Olivier

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For some time now I've been bumping into him wherever I go, and he looks at me with his huge deep eyes, sharp but brooding, full of suppressed fire.

Fernande Olivier on Picasso

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There are some people who are badly turned out well; and some people who are well turned out badly.

Edgar Degas

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There is love and there is work, and we can only have one heart.

Edgar Degas

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There is sometimes a certain ease in awkwardness which, if I am not mistaken, is more graceful than grace itself.

Barbey D’Aurevilly

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When you fall under the spell of someone, there is often a dual movement within you: Even as you succumb to the other person's powerful influence, you feel an equal and opposite impulse to bolster your own identity, to fortify yourself--in a sense, to push back. If your own sense of who you are is still to some extent unformed, as was Degas's at this point, you must hurry on and form it. You must do this, however, under duress, since the other person is all the while exerting his seductive influence and, in the process, unintentionally reminding you of all the ways in which your earlier self was weak and insufficient. This dynamic is a tremendous spur to creativity. But it makes for volatile relations.

Sebastian Smee

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Being in love with someone in that extreme way--being totally, physically obsessed by someone--is like having some dreadful disease. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Francis Bacon

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I'm not talking about habits, nor am I talking about hysterics. I'm talking about actual, complete, absolute concern, where everything about the other person interests, worries, or pleases you.

Lucian Freud on love

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Nikad nemoj traziti istinu o onima koje volis. Ne treba se znati previse o svojim idolima

Vladimir

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Hoping I'll never find out that you're anyone else Cause I love you just how you are Hope you never find out who I really am Cause you'll never love me, you'll never love me You'll never love me but I believe it when you say it like that Oh do you mean it when you say it like that? Oh I believe it when you say it like that You must really love me

SZA

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At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father's shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.

My Brilliant Friend (329)