people who stand alone + burn

‘There’s an image system at work in the world. To behave in accordance with these images bored me, to deviate from them filled me with anxiety. We wait for an experience large or brutal enough to break it open completely. I had to break it.’

⤷ NW (2016; film naar het boek van Zadie Smith)

‘I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.’

⤷ Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

‘There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something further away, beyond her reach.’

⤷ Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

‘Dear Antigone,
I take it as the task of the translator to forbid that you should ever lose your screams.’

⤷ The task of the Translator of Antigone, Anne Carson

‘You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?’

⤷ The Glass Essay, Anne Carson

‘Mad people = people who stand alone + burn. I’m attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.’

⤷ As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, Susan Sontag

‘Most everything I do seems to have as much to do with intuition as with reason. . . . The kind of thinking that makes a distinction between thought and feeling is just one of those forms of demagogy that causes lots of trouble for people by making them suspicious of things that they shouldn’t be suspicious or complacent of.

For people to understand themselves in this way seems to be very destructive, and also very culpabilizing. These stereotypes of thought versus feeling, heart versus head, male versus female were invented at a time when people were convinced that the world was going in a certain direction — that is, toward technocracy, rationalization, science, and so on — but they were all invented as a defense against Romantic values.’

⤷ Susan Sontag: the complete Rolling Stone interview