ronnie

“And he'll supplant a man, supplant him - take his place as if he was nothing but an old rag, and never stop to think that a man's not an old rag. Oh lord, oh dear! What a misfortune...!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double

“But fear and anxiety are not the same at all. One is an appropriate reaponse to a real situation which I can accept and learn to work through just as I work through semi-blindness. But the other, anxiety, is an immobilizing yield to things that go bump in the night, a surrender to namelessness, formlessness, voicelessness, and silence.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“The spectacle of mass movement draws attention inevitably to the borders, the porous places, the vulnerable points where one's concept of home is seen as being menaced by foreigners. Much of the alarm hovering at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by (1) both the threat and the promise of globalism and (2) an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artefact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity. Of course this 'sheen of antiquity' of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime. In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling - which is to say grime. If indeed 'elegance is frigid', it can as well be described as filthy.”
― Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows and Other Essays