Sona

“what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?”
― Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

“You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination, now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were wonderful. Because you had genius and intellect. Because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My god, how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been. You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. I will never mention your name. You don’t know what you were to me once. Why once—oh—I can’t bear to think of it. I wish I’d never laid eyes upon you. You have spoiled the romance of my life. How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art. What are you without your art? Nothing! (Dorian)”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

“They will tell you that to be political is to be merely angry, and therefore artless, depthless, "raw," and empty. They will speak of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. They will tell you that great writing "breaks free" from the political, thereby "transcending" the barriers of difference, uniting people toward universal truths. They'll say this is achieved through craft above all. Let's see how it's made, they'll say- as if how something is assembled is alien to the impulse that created it. As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form.”
― Ocean Vuong

“I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays