Stephanie > Stephanie's Quotes

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Desire has no history...”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.

Photographs are.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

“All struggle, all resistance is -- must be -- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent- if not inappropriate- response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may- in ways we might prefer not to imagine- be linked to their suffering, as the wealth as some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“People don't become inured to what they are shown - if that's the right way to describe what happens - because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. The states described as apathy, moral or emotional anesthesia, are full of feelings; the feelings are rage and frustration. ”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“Time heals all wounds. And if it doesn't, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“I never lie ― I am a blatantly truthful person about almost everything. My addiction (or disease as some call it) always lies. I have had very good relationships, but the addict in me always fucked them up. I fall in love quickly, it's a high that rivals drugs for a while. I am monogamous, but I always cheated with depression before the relationship fell apart. Addicts need best friends, healthy people need healthy relationships.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“When he kisses me, I cry. I explain it's not because I wish he were someone else, it's because it's such a shock to the system to be desired after feeling so completely abandoned.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“I will be forever grateful for your presence in my life. I am a much better human being because of you. The experience of loving you, living with you, was the greatest journey of my life thus far. You showed me an alternative to the man I was becoming.

I know I still have much to learn, much to accomplish, and I know my future is bright. I owe you the confidence I now have in myself. This is the confidence that could only come from the knowledge that a woman of your caliber loved me for who I am; for what you saw in me.

You are a great woman and I mean that in the strongest sense of the phrase. You feel deeply, think deeply, and live deeply. I admire so much about you. Regardless of whether our paths cross again, know that I am actively wishing you success and happiness. I pray that you will once again be part of my life. But if left with just the experience we've shared, I know my life was better because of it.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“Is it needy? It's not. We don't need each other. We just really, really enjoy each other. And we're good together. We're good people together. And I have the funniest feeling. I can really, truly touch this all, this happiness and the sadness too, I can trace all of it with my fingers. It isn't theoretical or distant. This feels like me. This is me. I love him, and, for the first time in a relationship, I also like me. Every time he says "I love you," I answer, "I believe you.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“Of course he freaked me out.
Of course it's nothing to do with me.
But none of that matters.
He loved me and now he doesn't.
I was everything to him and now I am nothing.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“There is a blessing in losing the one we love. It's the blessing of self-transformation. You don't have to who you were anymore. You've struggled. And now you can change. It doesn't mean that bits of that person won't cling to you, they will throughout your life, but they are now subsumed into something greater. That person has given you, in fact, the most important blessing, which is they gave you the blessing of transforming your soul into
something better, something more beautiful.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“It's only a heartache. It isn't a tragedy. A tragedy would be losing the father of my children to cancer. This I wrestle with the hardest. There are thirty-one flavors of pain, like Baskin Robbins in hell. Am I allowed to feel pain at a breakup? When there is so much other shit going on in this world? Love is extremely serious. I don't think this is trivial.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“You can have this kind of love. You can have it.
You just grab it. Of course the problem with
having that love is that you can lose it, too.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“It's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“No one ever loved you like him.
And no one ever took it away so completely.
But it's here.
Look around.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“It took a long time, but my heart now feels full when I think of him. When you fall in love again—which I have—it's funny the other things that come back in with that open-ness. You have this ghost chorus of the lovers who came before, but they're benign now, they're good spirits.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“People don't know. We don't know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people. We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who've left us is because we knew them so well.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“Yes, I have patterns of love addiction.
But I'm a woman.
Of course I do.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head

“I want you to stay.
I never want there to be a time
when we don't share space.”
― Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head