⊹⊹⊹gw

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“I’ve often thought of a female Christ. David told me there’s one in a church in Montreal. Mostly the world can’t take it. Because of people’s feelings about the delicacy of women and also because of what a meaningless display female suffering simply is. If you belittle us in school, treat us like slaves at home and finally, if you get a woman alone in bed just tell her she’s all wrong, no matter what sex you are. . . or maybe you just grab one on the street and fuck her real fast—in an alley, or in her own bed.
I mean if that’s the way it usually goes for this girl what would be the point in seeing her half nude and nailed up? Where’s the contradiction? Could that drive the culture for 2,000 years? No way. Female suffering must be hidden, or nothing can work. It’s a man’s world and a girl on a cross would be like seeing a dead animal in a trap. We like to eat them, or see them stuffed, we even like to wear them, but watch them suffer? Hear them wail?”
― Eileen Myles, Cool for You

“What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire