Sylvain

“In the theatre that I was used to in school and colleges and in amateur circles, the actors rehearsed more or less in secrecy and then sprung their finished perfection. on an unsuspecting audience who were of course surprised into envious admiration: oh, what perfection, what talent, what inspired gifts - I certainly could never do such a thing! Such a theatre is part of the general bourgeois education system which practices education as a process of weakening people, of making them feel they cannot do this or that - oh, it must take such brains! - In other words education as a means of mystifying knowledge and hence reality. Education, far from giving people -the confidence in their ability and capacities to overcome obstacles or to become masters of the laws governing external nature as human beings, tends to make them feel their inadequacies, their weaknesses and their incapacities in the face of reality; and their inability to do anything about the conditions governing their lives. They become more and more alienated from themselves and from their natural and social environment. Education as a process of alienation produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers. The Olympian gods of the Greek mythology or the dashing knights of the middle ages are reborn in the -twentieth century as superstar politicians, scientists, sportsmen, actors, the handsome doers or heroes, with the ordinary people watching passively, gratefully, admiringly.”
― Ngugi wa Thiong'o

“Tuer confère un style à l'existence. C'est ce possible continuellement présent qui, par son insertion inavouable dans la vie courante, injecte à celle-ci le tonus sans quoi elle se résume à une reptation asthénique et à l'interminable expérimentation de l'ennui.”
― Hubert Aquin, Next Episode

“Thank you, Jesus, for blindness that every once in a great while allows one of us to hit the target.”
― John Edgar Wideman, Fanon

“Nothing seems to me more tragic than the pressures we put on artists to do what we think we'll like, and our refusal to prize what is most ornery and special about them.”
― Marcia B. Siegel