
“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”
― Ordinary Men
― Ordinary Men

“Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. If all the complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.
Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar,' to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.”
―
Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar,' to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.”
―
“Climb
Is all we know
When thaw
Is not below us
No, can't grow up
In that iron ground
Claire, all too sore for sound
Bet
Is hardly shown
Scraped
Across the foam
Like they stole it
And oh, how they hold it
Claire, we nearly forfeit
I, I'm growing like the quickening hues
I, I'm telling darkness from lines on you
Over havens fora full and swollen morass, young habitat
All been living alone, where the ice snap and the hold clast are known
Home
We're savage high
Come
We finally cry
Oh and we don it
Because it's right
Claire, I was too sore for sight
I, we're sewing up through the latchet greens
I, un-peel keenness, honey, bean for bean
Same white pillar tone as with the bone street sand is thrown where she stashed us at
All been living alone, where the cracks at in the low part of the stoning”
―
Is all we know
When thaw
Is not below us
No, can't grow up
In that iron ground
Claire, all too sore for sound
Bet
Is hardly shown
Scraped
Across the foam
Like they stole it
And oh, how they hold it
Claire, we nearly forfeit
I, I'm growing like the quickening hues
I, I'm telling darkness from lines on you
Over havens fora full and swollen morass, young habitat
All been living alone, where the ice snap and the hold clast are known
Home
We're savage high
Come
We finally cry
Oh and we don it
Because it's right
Claire, I was too sore for sight
I, we're sewing up through the latchet greens
I, un-peel keenness, honey, bean for bean
Same white pillar tone as with the bone street sand is thrown where she stashed us at
All been living alone, where the cracks at in the low part of the stoning”
―

“She thought (...) of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.”
― Signs and Symbols
― Signs and Symbols

“But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear.”
― Swann’s Way
― Swann’s Way
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