Whitney Pergram

“I could live without television, but not without books.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Libraries, archives, and museums all find themselves at the intersection of materiality and the mystical. Perhaps this is why we’re so quiet when we enter them.”
― Jenn Shapland

“So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Some would call that an ethics.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”
― Saul Bellow, The Paris Review, Issue 36, Winter 1966