Elaine Scarry > Quotes

“to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.”
― Elaine Scarry

“This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. “English,” writes Virginia Woolf, “which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache.” … Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.”
― Elaine Scarry

“Beauty always takes place in the particular.”
― Elaine Scarry

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land.”
― Elaine Scarry

“Physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“The larger the prisoner's pain (the smaller the prisoner's world and therefore by comparison) the larger the torturer's world... pain becomes power... the torturer uses the prisoner's aliveness to crush the things that he lives for.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“It is the intense pain that destroys a person's self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“Beauty as lifesaving.

Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living worth living.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation. Beauty, according to its critics, causes us to gape and suspend all thought.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them suddenly all problems would subside.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“Our desire for beauty is likely to outlast its object because, as Kant once observed, unlike all other pleasures, the pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible. No matter how long beautiful things endure, they cannot out-endure our longing for them.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“The material world constrain us, often with gret beneficence, to see each person and thing in its time and place, its historical context. But mental life doesn't so constrain us. It is porous, open to air and light, swings forward while swaying back, scatters its stripes in all directions, and delights to find itself beached beside something invented only that morning or instead standing beside an altar from three millennia ago.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Beauty as a “greeting”. At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral background as though coming forward to welcome you – as thought the object were designated to “fit” your perception.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“What is imagining like? Like being a plant. What is imagining? It is not-perception: it is instead the quasi-percipient, slightly percipient, almost percipient, not yet percipient, after-percipient of perceptual mimesis. Like the rolled-back pale peach of the daylily Oakleigh, it is not sentience but sentience rolled back.”
― Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book

“He cannot will his entry into and exit from the activity on a daily basis. There is not, as there is for most workers, a brief interval of exemption at the end of the day when he is permitted to enact a wholly different set of gestures; the timing of his eventual exit will by determined not by his own will but by the end of the war, whether that comes in days, months, or years, and there is of course a very high probability that even when the war ends he will never exit from it. Although in all forms of work the worker mixes himself with and eventually becomes inseparable from the materials of his labor (an inseparability that has only its most immediate sign the residues which coat his body, the coal beneath the skin of his arm, the spray of grain in his hair, the ink on his fingers), the boy in war is, to an extent, found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor: he will learn to perceive himself as he will be perceived by others, as indistinguishable from the men of his unit, regiment, division, and above all national group (all of whom will share the same name: he is German) as he is also inextricably bound up with the qualities and conditions – berry laden or snow laden - of the ground over which he walks or runs or crawls and with which he craves and courts identification, as in the camouflage postures he adopts, now running bent over parallel with the ground it is his work to mime, now arching forward conforming the curve of his back to the curve of a companion boulder, now standing as upright and still and narrow as the slender tree behind which he hides; he is the elms and the mud, he is the one hundred and sixth, he is a small piece of German terrain broken off and floating dangerously through the woods of France. He is a fragment of American earth wedged into an open hillside in Korea and reworked by its unbearable sun and rain. He is dark blue like the sea. He is light grey like the air through which he flies. He is sodden in the green shadows of earth. He is a light brown vessel of red Australian blood that will soon be opened and emptied across the rocks and ridges of Gallipoli from which he can never again become distinguishable.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“...because material composition so unquestionably entails motion (making a sculpture or a shield or a painting requires motion just as much as walking or horseback riding or rising from one's chair does), we may be predisposed to discover it in mental composition as well.”
― Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book

“The room...is converted into a weapon, ... made to demonstrate that everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no door, no chair, no bed.”
― Elaine Scarry

“Folded into the uneven aesthetic surfaces of the world is a pressure toward social equality.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Because the practice of writing is, then, a laying down of flowers upon flowers, it may be regarded as an exteriorization of what the imagining mind does, and of what it was doing long before it invented this external form of itself.”
― Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book

“In effect, writers give us a transcript of how the brain works because they look at the images turning up in their own minds with such concentration and dedication.”
― Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book

“When one goes on to find "better", or "higher", or "truer", or "more enduring", or "more widely agreed upon" forms of beauty, what happens to our regard for the less good, less high, less true, less universal instances? Simone Weil says, "He who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the world itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before".”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“What is striking about such unmediated juxtapositions, and relevant to the way in which at the end of war opened bodies and verbal issues are placed side by side, is that in most instances the verbal assertion has no source of substantiation other than the body.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“The chapter ends by showing that nuclear war more closely approximates the model of torture than the model of conventional war because it is a structural impossibility that the populations whose bodies are used in the confirmation process can have exercised any consent over this use of their bodies.”
― Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

“One day I ran into a friend, and when he asked me what I was doing, I said I was trying to explain how beauty leads us to justice... he remembered being a child in India and coming upon Aristotle’s statement that justice was a perfect cube: he had been completely baffled by the statement, except he knew it had something to do with equality in all directions.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just