“I am not ‘half Japanese’ and ‘half Lithuanian Jewish.“ When I’m singing a Japanese folk song, I don’t sing with half my voice, but with my whole voice. When I’m taping together my grandparents’ Jewish marriage contract, worn by time but still resilient, it’s not half of my heart that is moved, but my whole heart. I am complete, and I embody layers of identities that belong together. I am made of layers, not fractions.”
— Yumi Thomas (via wearejapanese)
“The cliché that when women are liberated men will be liberated too shamelessly slides over the raw reality of male domination — as if this were an arrangement in fact arranged by nobody, which suits nobody, which works to nobody’s advantage. In fact, the very opposite is true. The domination of men over women is to the advantage of men; the liberation of women will be at the expense of male privilege. Perhaps afterwards, in some happy sense, men will be liberated too — liberated from the tiresome obligation to be ‘masculine.’ But allowing oppressors to lay down their psychological burdens is quite another, secondary sense of liberation. The first priority is to liberate the oppressed. Never before in history have the claims of oppressed and oppressors turned out to be, on inspection, quite harmonious. It will not be true this time either.”
— From “The Third World of Women,” by Susan Sontag. Partisan Review, Vol. 40, No. 2 (1973).
“It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little–have few verbal means. Eloquence–thinking in words–is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.”
— Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
(via the-book-diaries)
“I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy,”
— Frank O'Hara, from “Meditations in an Emergency”, Selected Poems
“The living tell the dying not to leave, and the dying do not listen. The dying tell us not to be sad for them, and we do not listen. The dialogue between the living and the dead is full of misunderstanding and silence.”
— Welcome to Night Vale | The Auction
“I lived in a house in Moscow once, where the beams and floorboards were made from an old ship’s timbers. When there was a storm at sea, the timbers used to creak and groan, even though the air around the house was quite still. The house was very old, and those timbers hadn’t been near the sea for a hundred years or more, but still they remembered. In their dreams they heard it sing.”
— Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Anna (via countcracula)