Niels > Niels's Quotes

“When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

“Love is just a four letter word! (laughter) Because that’s what it is for me! I don’t know what it means... I mean, love didn’t work, whatever the hell that is, in my life. Alone I am. I’m not particularly into self-love either. I’m quite prepared to die. And all the objects of my love slowly trail off.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“I know that I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it. And I get it. The tortured artist is the artist that gets remembered for all time, particularly if they if they either perish or overcome. But the truth is that so many of us are stuck in the middle. So many of us begin tortured and end tortured, with only brief bursts of light in between, and I'd rather have average art and survival than miracles that come at the cost of someone's life.”
― Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“It’s easy to convince people that you are really okay if they don’t have to actually hear what rattles you in the private silence of your own making.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“No matter how obsessed you've been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who wants you whole.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“History, both the arm holding down the drowning body and the voice claiming the water is holy.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“The thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.”
― Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

“Violence is man re-creating himself. ”
― Frantz Fanon

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
― Anthony Bourdain