Monster Okay

“The Young Girl knows everything as devoid of consequences, even her own suffering. Everything is funny, nothing's a big deal. Everything is cool, nothing is serious.”
― Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl

“To tell about him, one should be French, because only the people of that nation manage to explain to others what they don’t understand themselves.”
― Николай Лесков, The Enchanted Wanderer: and Other Stories

“Jeff says he enjoyed his physics course in high school, and got top grades, but "ever since I have had physics at the university I have had much trouble with it. This was a huge blow to me because I was used to doing well in school. I thought there was nothing I couldn't do if I just wanted it bad enough."

My reply will go like this: "You might want to read the picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. The epiphany at the end, as I recall, is that we shouldn't be seeking harrowing challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we were apparently born to perform.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

“Public interference with poetry rests on the popular delusion that an immediate commerce exists between historical truth and poetic truth; that the historical universe is potentially the poetic universe. The historical universe is, however, only a temporary aggregate of ideas. These ideas may direct the structure of the literary universe, which produces the philosophical journalism of a period; the structure of the poetic universe is directed by a person in single-handed conflict with the time-community. Science, the present-day aggregate of tribal ideas, puts on the creative mind a social compulsion to accept these ideas; and criticism acts, as usual, as the nattered instrument of conversion. Official literature is born of a critical rather than of a literary sense; it is the social institution which the [professionalized] poet is hired to serve.”
― Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs