Hussein Mohamoud

“Critics established the right to say whatever they pleased about the dead. It is an absolute power, and the corruption that comes with it, very often, is an atrophy of the moral imagination. They move onto the living because they can no longer feel the difference between the living and the dead. They extend over the living that license to say whatever they please, to ransack their psyche and reinvent them however they please. They stand in front of classes and present this performance as exemplary civilized activity—this utter insensitivity towards other living human beings. Students see the easy power and are enthralled, and begin to outdo their teachers. For a person to be corrupted in that way is to be genuinely corrupted.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand!… We choose our next world through what we learn in this one…”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Theory and interpretation, far from threatening works of art, keep them alive.”
― Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

“Creative work in any established system of thought takes place at the boundaries of the system, where its powers of explanation are least developed and its vulnerability to outside attack is most marked.”
― Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives