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

“Trials are won by attorneys whose stories fit, and lost by those whose stories are like the shapeless housecoat that truth, in her disdain of appearances, has chosen as her uniform.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Crime of Sheila McGough

“Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie.”
― Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

“I remember a seminar I once attended that was led by a brilliant and flamboyant Hungarian analyst named Robert Bak. The issue under debate was the nature of transference, and I raised my hand and asked rhetorically, "What would you call an interpersonal relationship where infantile wishes, and defenses against those wishes, get expressed in such a way that the persons within that relationship don't see each other for what they objectively are but, rather, view each other in terms of their infantile needs and their infantile conflicts. What would you call that?" And Bak looked over at me ironically and said, 'I'd call that life.”
― Janet Malcolm