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“This is because language is inexorably predicated upon the principle of loss: when we acquire language, we have no choice but to adapt our private desires and fantasies to the collective networks of symbols that conform to our culture’s value systems.”
— A cheery view of language from the quite brilliant Gothic Visions: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear by Dani Cavallaro
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It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. […] What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
Michael Cunningham, from The Hours (Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 1998)
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Everybody heads towards the center, that’s why I’m here now. I’m here just to breathe it. It might be dying, or there might be a lot of dirt in the air, but this is where it’s happening.
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