sx/sp
Frank O'Hara's poem
Morning
"The supreme pleasure we can know, Freud said, and the model for all pleasure, orgasmic pleasure, comes when an excess tension built up, confined, compacted is abruptly released; the pleasure consists in a passage into the contentment and quiescence of death. Is not orgasm instead the passage into the uncontainment and unrest of liquidity and vapour – pleasure in discharges, secretions, exhalations? Lust surges through a body in transformation." — Alphonso Lingis
so/sx
"I think that when people are at their most frivolous, superficial, gregarious, and chatty is often when they are most revealing about themselves. Woolf writes very brilliantly about that. We all have different parts of ourselves, and your secret self, your solitary self, your nighttime self, your gregarious, chatty, e-mailing self are all mixed up together. They overlap." — Hermione Lee
sp/so
"Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us." — Alain de Botton
"My father could out-weather anybody. Like people anywhere, there were times when it was the only topic where people here felt comfortably expressive, and my father could go on earnestly, seemingly forever. When the current weather was exhausted, there was all the weather that had occurred in recorded history, weather lived through or witnessed by a relative, or even heard about on the news. Catastrophic weather of all types. And when that was done with, there was all the weather that might possibly occur in the future. I'd even heard him speculate about weather in the afterlife. Dad and Linda Wishkob talked about the weather for quite a while and then she got up and left.
You really put her through the wringer, Dad.
[...]
I wanted to get a feel for how she was doing, said my father. She's been through the wringer enough, for real.
I wasn't sure what coming down to talk with Linda Wishkob was about, but apparently some exchange I didn't understand took place." — Louise Erdrich, The Roundhouse
sp/sx
Nature is on the inside, says Cezanna. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them. — Merleau-Ponty
so/sp
"Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny each other’s existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal." — Ingmar Bergman
sp 4/5 - "My sensitivity to the slightest change in my environment, and my craving for unusual psychological pressure have made me aware how little other people are aware of their surroundings, how little they know of themselves and how little they notice me." — Jill Magid
sp - "I had not yet recognized all the subtle clues that beauty is only an easy label for a complex set of emotions: feelings of safety and grace and well-being." — Lucy Grealy
