Lori Davidson

“By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something wextremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“I watched the gulls and looked over at Lady Liberty. I thought about what Harry must be feeling because she wouldn't see her again, not like this, anyway. I wanted her to know it would be better, more beautiful on the other side, but it was sad because we can't help loving what's around us even if it is grasping and attachment to the things that don't really matter when you take a higher spiritual perspective.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World

“...a broken body is a price worth paying for a strong and undefiled spirit. We live in a world of lies, whether we want it or not. That's just the case. But you shouldn't accommodate to it," she tells me as I sit her table in suburban Budapest. "You will be surrounded by lies--you don't have a choice. Don't assimilate to it. It's an individual decision for each person. If you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul. If your soul is free, then your thoughts are free, and then your words are going to be free.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“We are always concocting theories about how the world works and why people act in the ways they do. We invent motives for them, as if it's possible for us to know, but more often than not these explanations are like flimsy cardboard state sets we put up in front of reality because they are simpler and less distracting than what's actually there. I think I became a documentary filmmaker to try to get a truer view. It's not that film can't lie or distort or be used for dastardly purposes, it's that sometimes the camera extracts from the faces and bodies of its subjects what they do not say aloud. I was sixteen when I first saw Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity, and after that, I couldn't stop thinking about he expressiveness of people's hands when they are controlling their faces.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World