Category: Quotes

“Everyone can draw on myth to sublimate their own modest experiences: betrayed by a woman he loves, one man calls her a slut; another is obsessed by his own virile impotence: this woman is a praying mantis; yet another takes pleasure in his wife’s company: here we have Harmony, Repose, Mother Earth. The taste for eternity at bargain prices and for a handy, pocket-sized absolute, seen in most men, is satisfied by myths. The least emotion, a small disagreement, become the reflection of a timeless Idea; this illusion comfortably flatters one’s vanity.”

—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Terrible People

“The deathhauntedness of the Irish brethren was frequently a complication in the working life of Sheriff Stephen Devane. Soaked in an ambience of death from the cradle, they believed themselves generally to be on the way out, and sooner rather than later, and thus could be inclined to put aside the niceties of the living realm. Terrible people, born of a terrible nation.”
— Kevin Barry, The Heart in Winter

Consuming Normativity

“Consuming normativity can give us the illusion that we get to sample it when we choose, that it isn’t pressing in on us at all times. But at the same time, the desire to seize control of normativity…also generates a certain ambivalence. It confronts us with our lack of autonomy and the instability of our social position; it testifies to the necessity of constant self-presentation (as opposed to being accepted for how our intrinsic being “naturally” appears).”

—Anti-Instagrams, Internal Exile

Les choses sont contre nous

“All Sankey’s things—the chipped Baby Belling on the draining board; the bits of unmatched blue and fawn carpet; the one-bar fire, the transistor radio, the stereo with its handful of dog-eared albums from the early Seventies—had a used but uncooperative look. He had assembled them, and while he was still alive his personality had held them together; now they were distancing themselves from one another again like objects in a second-hand shop.”

—Climbers, M. John Harrison

“The light came from candles, and in December 1755, [Eddystone Rocks lighthouse] keeper, Henry Hall, found the lantern room on fire. No lives were lost that night but Hall himself died twelve days later, after complaining that his insides felt as if they were burning. It was not, as his friends had supposed, some form of post-traumatic shock. While gazing up in open-mouthed horror at the conflagration he accidentally swallowed some molten lead that was falling from the roof. A postmortem found seven ounces of it in his intestines.”
—Rosemary Hill, “Coiling in Anarchy”, London Review of Books