Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick > Quotes

“That's one of the things that "queer" can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies

“There is no unthreatened, unthreatening conceptual home for the concept of gay origins. We have all the more reason, then, to keep our understanding of gay origin, of gay cultural and material reproduction, plural, multi-capillaried, argus-eyed, respectful, and endlessly cherished.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

“It seems to me that an often quiet, but often palpable presiding image here... is the interpretive absorption of the child or adolescent whose sense of personal queerness may or may not (yet?) have resolved... Such a child - if she reads at all - is reading for important news about herself, without knowing what form that news will take; with only the patchiest familiarity with its codes; without, even, more than hungrily hypothesizing to what questions this news may proffer an answer.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

“This is because the caress is not a simple stroking; it is a shaping.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

“The ability of anyone in the culture to support and honour gay kids may depend on an ability to name them as such, notwithstanding that many gay adults may never have been gay kids and some gay kids may not turn into gay adults.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

“It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, and so on) precisely one, the gender of the object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as THE dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of 'sexual orientation.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

“Oh, right, I keep forgetting, for lots and lots of people in the world, the notion of “falling in love” has (of all things) sexual connotations. No, that’s not what I think is happening. For me, what falling in love means is different. It’s a matter of suddenly, globally, “knowing” that another person represents your only access to some vitally
transmissible truth
or radiantly heightened
mode of perception,
and that if you lose the thread of this intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desert-like state of ontological impoverishment.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love

“What I mean is that, if a lot of queer energy, say around adolescence, goes into what Barthes calls “le vouloir-être-intelligent” (as in “If I have to be miserable, at least let me be brainier than everybody else”), accounting in large part for paranoia’s enormous prestige as the very signature of smartness (a smartness that smarts), a lot of queer energy, later on, goes into … practices aimed at taking the terror out of error, at making the making of mistakes sexy, creative, even cognitively powerful. Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?25”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

“Of all forms of love, paranoia is the most ascetic, the love that demands least from its object.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

“From the point of view of this relatively new and inchoate academic presence, then, the gay studies movement, what distinctive soundings are to be reached by posing the question our way—and staying for an answer? Let's see how it sounds.

Has there ever been a gay Socrates?

Has there ever been a gay Shakespeare?

Has there ever been a gay Proust?

Does the Pope wear a dress? If these questions startle, it is not least as tautologies.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

“...modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

“If critical analysis of repression is itself inseparable from repression, then surely to think with any efficacy has to be think in some distinctly different way.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

“The number of persons or institutions by whom the existence of gay people—never mind the existence of more gay people—is treated as a precious desideratum, a needed condition of life, is small, even compared to those who may wish for the dignified treatment of any gay people who happen already to exist. Advice on how to make sure your kids turn out gay, not to mention your students, your parishioners, your therapy clients, or your military subordinates, is less ubiquitous than you might think.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

“Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

“Sometimes I think the books that affect us most are fantasy books. I don't mean books in the fantasy genre; I don't even mean the books we fantasize about writing but don't write. What I'm thinking of here are the books we know about — from their titles, from reading reviews, or hearing people talk about them — but haven't, over a period of time, actually read. Books that can therefore have a presence, or exert a pressure in our lives and thinking, that may have little to do with what's actually inside them.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick