Petal > Petal's Quotes

“Anti-prostitution feminism is a place where men can participate in flinging slurs like "holes," "whores," "orifices," and "cum dumpsters" at sex workers– and call it feminist analysis. It's a place where men who consider themselves feminist-aligned can patronize and dismiss prostitute women, as men have done for centuries. It's a place where a police officer can rifle through the bathroom bin at a sex worker's flat, retrieve blood-soaked tampons, publish photographs of them in his memoir (with a touching dedication to sex workers he has met in his work: 'this is my attempt to describe your reality'), and still be treated like a feminist activist. As sex worker Charlotte Shane observes, anti-prostitution feminism makes it progressive for men to dwell incessantly on violent, coercive sex and abject bodies while at the same time enjoying praise and even Pulitzer Prizes.”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith

“Feminist conversations about sex work are often seen as arguments between those who are 'sex positive' and those who are 'sex negative.' . . . We have no interest in positioning ourselves within that terrain. Instead, we assert the right for all women to be 'sex ambivalent.”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith

“Trans-exclusionary and anti-sex-work feminism amplify the mainstream movement’s desire for power and authority, and pursue it by policing the borders of feminism and womanhood. The mainstream preoccupation with threat becomes an overt ‘us and them’ mentality, and the necropolitical desire for annihilation is deliberately turned on more marginalised people.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“But," she said to the priest, "I'm not dead yet. I've heard the angels farting on the ceiling.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“One cannot all of a sudden deprive a society of its essence.”
― Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption

“In effect, vice turns common sense upside-down, and he who admits himself to be vicious abides by stigmatizing terms of horror.”
― Georges Bataille

“I entered into this darkness where, ever since, I plunge deeper every hour and lose myself a little more.”
― Georges Bataille, The Impossible: A Story of Rats followed by Dianus and by The Oresteia

“Human life, distinct from juridical existence, existing as it does on a
globe isolated in celestial space, from night to day and from one country
to another—human life cannot in any way be limited to the closed
systems assigned to it by reasonable conceptions. The immense travail
of recklessness, discharge, and upheaval that constitutes life could be
expressed by stating that life starts with the deficit of these systems;
at least what it allows in the way of order and reserve has meaning
only from the moment when the ordered and reserved forces liberate
and lose themselves for ends that cannot be subordinated to any thing
one can account for. It is only by such insubordination—even if it is
impoverished—that the human race ceases to be isolated in the unconditional
splendor of material things.”
― Georges Bataille

“[Y]ou're in a fog. When you circle round, you watch us live. You watch us struggle and you're envious.”
― Jean Genet, The Maids and Deathwatch

“Even there, intimacy evolved its alchemy. A solemn marble stairway led to corridors covered with red carpets, upon which one moved noiselessly.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“If I can not have the most brilliant destiny, I want the most wretched, not for the purpose of a sterile solitude, but in order to achieve something new with such rare matter.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“I saw your sad as if a charity
in radiant in night long morphic sheen
and tears the tomb of your infinity.

— Georges Bataille, from “Je revais de toucher” in “5 poems,” Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle, Volume III, issue 4, December 2008”
― Georges Bataille

“The solid citizens going by, who make up the crowd, see nothing, know nothing. They are scarcely, imperceptibly, dislodged from their calm state of confidence by the trivial event: Divine being led away by the arm, and her sisters who bewail her.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth inordinately and turning it around over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is my way of seeing the end of the world.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“The laughter or the tears break out in the vacuum of thought created by their object in the mind. But these moments, like the deeply
rhythmed movements of poetry, of music, of love, of dance, have the power - to capture - and endlessly recapture the moment that
counts, the moment of rupture, of fissure. As if we were trying to arrest the moment and freeze it in the constantly renewed gasps
of our laughter or our sobs. The miraculous moment when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING, detaching us from the ground on
which we were groveling, in the concatenation of useful activity”
― Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy; Volume II. The History of Eroticism and Volume III. Sovereignty

“VII The happiness we find in becoming is possible only by annihilating the reality of “existences” and lovely appearance, and through the pessimistic destruction of illusions: so, by annihilating even the loveliest appearances, Dionysian happiness attains its height.”
― Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche

“As for me, I have chosen: I will be on the side of crime. And I will help the children, not to win back access to your houses, your factories, your schools, your laws, and sacraments, but to destroy them.”
― Jean Genet, Criminal Child: And Other Essays

“And he was apprehensive that some light, emanating from within his body, or from his true consciousness, might not be illuminating him, might not, in some way from inside the scaly carapace, give off a reflection of that true form and make him visible to men, who would then have to hunt him down.”
― Jean Genet, Querelle

“What becomes of all those people who are the successful products of a strict upbringing?
It is inconceivable that they were able to express and develop their true feelings as children, for anger and helpless rage, which they were forbidden to display, would have been among these feelings - particularly if these children were beaten, humiliated, lied to, and deceived. What becomes of this forbidden and therefore unexpressed anger? Unfortunately, it does not disappear, but is transformed with time into a more or less conscious hatred directed against either the self or substitute persons, a hatred that will seek to discharge itself in various ways permissible and suitable for an adult.”
― Alice Miller

“The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, our perceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday the body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.”
― Alice Miller

“I want to live my own life, to be at peace and not to think all the time about how they hit me and humiliated me and almost tortured me.”
― Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting

“In her garret, Divine lived only on tea and grief.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“I leave you free to imagine any dialogue you please. Choose whatever may charm you. Have it, if you like, that they hear the voice of the blood, or that they fall in love at first sight... Conceive the wildest improbabilities. Have it that the depths of their beings are thrilled at accosting each other in slang. Tangle them suddenly in a swift embrace or a brotherly kiss. Do whatever you like.”
― jean genet

“I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it 
will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty 
lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter
 beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the 
casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a
 glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself.”
― Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader

“Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.”
― Georges Bataille

“If I want to realize totality in my consciousness, I have to relate myself to an immense, ludicrous, and painful convulsion of all of humanity.”
― Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche

“The door made the usual, terrifying sound of a door.”
― Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose

“Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on.”
― Georges Bataille, Guilty

“Our personal hallucination now developed as boundlessly as perhaps the total nightmare of human society, for instance, with earth, sky, and atmosphere.”
― Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye