Jonathan Kemp > Quotes

“And no greater desire exists than a wounded person’s need for another wound.”
― Jonathan Kemp

“Erotic submission is a limit-experience, beyond which something else comes into play, something not quite human.”
― Jonathan Kemp, Twentysix

“Prostitution is the apotheosis of capitalism.”
― Jonathan Kemp, London Triptych

“I sat alone, armed with the eye of an anthropologist and the heart of a beggar.”
― Jonathan Kemp, London Triptych

“The difference between what we want and what we are able to do emerges with the slow, poisonous crawl of grief. The hunger doesn’t abate, it seems; it only eats you up.”
― Jonathan Kemp, Twentysix

“but what of the selling of one's soul, or one's freedom, one's individual spirit? Doesn't one's life also have a price? How much am I worth? How much is he worth?”
― Jonathan Kemp, London Triptych

“Wrap me in colours that cannot be described, patterns that change with each movement like a kaleidoscope. Give me a world beyond what is here. Give me a body in flames dancing in a place where there is no shame. Give me lies, if you like, but take me there, to that other world where language can only play games of hide and seek with what is really going on.”
― Jonathan Kemp, Twentysix

“But the life that art creates is not the same as the life that creates art.”
― Jonathan Kemp, London Triptych

“In this life, dreams are all we have to remind us of who we really are or should be. How different my life would have been if I'd been strong enough to defy everyone in the pursuit of freedom. How difficult life is without the freedom to discover who you are meant to be. I refuse to believe I was meant to be so unhappy.”
― Jonathan Kemp, London Triptych

“She builds such walls around herself that no one could ever scale them. But I have also seen that moment when who she wants to be and who she appears to be coincide so gloriously that it is enough to make you trust in saints.”
― Jonathan Kemp, Twentysix

“But it is such a grotesque name that I fail to link it with him, with his beauty: Gregory. How can a parent burden a child with such a monstrous name? There's no nobility in it, no grace. It sounds like the death rattle of an ancient bullfrog.”
― Jonathan Kemp

“Freedom is always frightening; that's why most people choose not to be free.”
― Jonathan Kemp, London Triptych

“It is best to believe almost everything one writes and almost nothing one reads, because in order to believe something completely one must have lived it, and one does not live a book one has read, only a book one has written.”
― Jonathan Kemp, London Triptych

“Each moment is as empty or as full as a mirror.”
― Jonathan Kemp, Twentysix

“We all accept without question - on faith - that the way we see the world is the way it is, the way other people see it, a truth or a fact that need not be corroborated.”
― Jonathan Kemp, London Triptych

“youth is wasted on the young. And he was right. You look back on your own youth and view it with the eyes of another person, and it seems as foreign as another country, as distant as a star.”
― Jonathan Kemp, London Triptych