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Here’s what impresses me: Sangfroid. Good health. The ability to float softly with an iron core through Ashtanga primary series. Eye contact. Self-possession. Loyalty. Boundaries. Good posture. Moderation. Restraint. Laugh lines. Gardening. Activism. Originality. Kindness. Self-awareness. Simple food, prepared with love. Style. Hope. Lust. Grace. Aging. Humility. Nurturance. Learning from mistakes. Moving on. Letting go. Forms of practice, in other words. Constant, ongoing work. No endpoint in sight. Not goal-oriented, not gendered. Idiosyncratic and pretty much impossible to monetize. I mean: What kind of person are you? What kind of craft have you honed? What is my experience of looking into your eyes, being around you? Are you at home in your body? Can you sit still? Do you make me laugh? Can you give and receive affection? Do you know yourself? How sophisticated is your sense of humor, how finely tuned your understanding of life’s absurdities? How thoughtfully do you interact with others? How honest are you with yourself? How do you deal with your various addictive tendencies? How do you face your darkness? How broad and deep is your perspective? How willing are you to be quiet? How do you care for yourself? How do you treat people you deem unimportant?
Elisa Albert, The Snarling Girl
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If you want to know who controls you, look to who you are not allowed to criticize.
Tacitus
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The tree of life, 2024 - by Skander Khlif (1983), Tunisian/German
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Joy Sullivan, from “At the Airport”, Instructions for Traveling West
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You wanted and wanted. You were like this endless thing. A well that never emptied.
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties
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“…these small decisions lead to a life just as each line here, each decision to make an incision onto the page, small unto itself, lengthens into a long poem, each new long poem builds into a book, each decision an incision onto time, mostly imperceptible in retrospect, not seen as decisions usually, just things you’re doing or have to do, insignificant, far from irrevocable, but they add up, incising a vague shape on the blank vast that says you are here…”
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“Always Finish What You Start”
Jason Koo / Prelude Mag
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I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason — things happen because we make them happen — but sometimes the mystic reaches its long fingers through the ether and taps us on the breastplate.
Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger
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- Timothy Snyder. The first and perhaps most important lesson from On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century (2017)
Snyder's new book, On Freedom, was published in 2024.
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˝A sensitive psychopath˝ (Hannibal S01E07)
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Medicine (composition draft) by Gustav Klimt
(via @lonequixote)
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We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.
—Samantha Harvey, Orbital
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