Hedges Quotes

“The porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what amounts to a personality. The one emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy men, especially if that desire involves the women’s physical and emotional degradation. The lightning in the films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is shaved off to give the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn, which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The acts onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd. The manicured and groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the sculpted bodies are unreal. Makeup and production mask blemishes. There are no beads of sweat, no wrinkle lines, no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow spectrum of sterilized dimensions. It does not include the dank smell of human bodies, the thump of a pulse, taste, breath—or tenderness. Those in films are puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotion, are devoid of authentic human beauty, and resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

“The hedges - yes, the hedges, the very synonym of Merry England - are yet there, and long may they remain. Without hedges England would not be England. Hedges, thick and high, and full of flowers, birds, and living creatures, of shade and flecks of sunshine dancing up and down the bark of the trees - I love their very thorns. You do not know how much there is in the hedges. (1884)”
― Jefferies Richard 1848-1887, The Life of the Fields, by Richard Jeffries ..

“I’d move to trim the front hedges by hand in an insane act of “yard maintenance.” This act of kaiju sized bonsai left me exhausted to attempt any more complex yard acts, but it did give me time to ponder the control a hand tool can provide.”
― Matt Puchalski, A Pandemic Gardening Journal

“She gazed across the veranda to a formal garden beyond. An area of green lawn was set up with chairs and tables, while behind them a fountain shot water high and splashed those sitting too close to it. Behind the fountain, parterre hedges were clipped to perfection. People milled about or stood in groups chatting.”
― Ellen Read, Murder at Monterey

“My childhood was full of hedges, the tight corset of green privet that ran the entire boundary of the house, orchard and garden; those I passed on the long walk to school, hedges of hawthorn and holly, sloe, blackberry and wild rose. In spring they were a tangle of white froth and carried primroses and cowslips at their base, violets and the odd bluebell that had strayed from the woods. In winter they would be peppered with scarlet, black and rust berries, grey clouds of old man's beard and dew-speckled spiders' webs that hung like diamond necklaces in the early-morning light.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Unlike Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, who set out consciously to establish one-party dictatorships and to extend their rule beyond their nation's original borders, inverted totalitarianism comes into being, not by design, but by inattention to the consequences of actions or especially of inactions. Or, more precisely, inattention to their cumulative consequences.
The lobbyist who seeks to influence a legislator by campaign contributions or other inducements does not seek to weaken the authority and prestige of representative institutions and thereby contribute to inverted totalitarianism. The legislator who votes in favor of a resolution giving the president virtually unlimited discretion in deciding when to wage war does not intend to weaken the powers of the legislature to the point where it lacks the will to check the president in matters of war, peace making, and foreign policy. The federal regulator who, despite thousands of letters of protest, approves a regulation allowing large media conglomerates to extend further their control over local markets may not intend to eliminate the possibility of outlets that give a voice to dissenting, political, economic, and ecological views. The employer who "busts" unions does not seek to weaken the structure of civil society and the power of its associations and nongovernmental organizations to counter the state and corporate capital. The occasional citizen who, muttering about corrupt politicians, retreats into political hibernation and emerges blindingly to cast a vote does not mean to make himself an easy object of manipulation or to confirm the elite's view of democracy as a useful illusion.”
― Sheldon Wolin