Adversaria (11)
‘…poetry, which is like modern dance for uncoordinated people’ —Claire Dederer (Love & Trouble, ch. 13)
‘…The Editor, an avuncular but testy figure who might send a few encouraging words written in a discouraging hand’ —Lavinia Greenlaw (Some Answers Without Questions, p. 99)
‘I read the letters but couldn’t understand them. I could understand the words but not the letters, yet I was trying to understand in order to get over my not-caring but the not-caring was stopping me from understanding, understanding without caring is not truly understanding, and faking understanding is not understanding’ —Noémi Lefebvre (Blue Self-Portrait, trans. Sophie Lewis, p. 57)
‘…we are all a patchwork of oddities’ —Anna Vaught (The Alchemy, p. 25)
‘The bookshelves went up up up ten feet, and then there was another expanse of ceiling above that, filled with dust motes drifting like the stuff of thought itself. It was as if the books were dreaming, and their dreams floated into the air above, just barely visible’ —Claire Dederer (Poser, ch. 5)
« La promptitude à croire le mal sans l’avoir assez examiné est un effet de l’orgueil et de la paresse. On veut trouver des coupables; et on ne veut pas se donner la peine d’examiner les crimes » —François duc de La Rochefoucauld (Les Maximes, 267)
‘…a healthy person had to watch himself continuously, he had to subject himself to minute rules, he had to guard against any deviation from the prescribed regimen. Only thus could he be healthy and live long, he was told. An odd way of achieving health and longevity!’ —Ludwig Edelstein (‘Ancient Philosophy and Medicine’ in Ancient, trans. C. Lilian Temkin, p. 358)
‘As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain necessary. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep’ —Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb, §21)
« Il arrive quelquefois des accidents dans la vie, d’où il faut être un peu fou pour se bien tirer. » —François duc de La Rochefoucauld (Les Maximes, 267)
Movable property ‘discountenances his reminiscences, his poetry and his enthusiastic gushings by historical and sarcastic recital of the baseness, cruelty, degradation, prostitution, infamy, anarch and revolt forged in the workshops of his romantic castles’ —Marx (‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, trans. Gregor Benton, in Early Writings, p. 339)
‘Books were there to be the same; to be ordered; to present life as a manageable, dependable proposition. Books were my stable family’ —Claire Dederer (Poser, ch. 12)
‘The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.’ —Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy, p. 297
« Il arrive quelquefois des accidents dans la vie, d’où il faut être un peu fou pour se bien tirer. » —François duc de La Rochefoucauld (Les Maximes, 267)
‘When art, which was the common language of social inaction, develops into independent art in the modern sense, emerging from its original religious universe and becoming individual production of separate works, it too becomes subject to the movement governing the history of all separate culture. Its declaration of independence is the beginning of its end.’—Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb, §186)
‘I am in the house of nouns here, and it fills me with the conviction that good books sometimes give: that life can be holdable in the hand, examined down to the dog hairs, eaten with the eyes and understood’ —Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy, p. 306)