Georgia Gardner

“(Interviews Ntozake Shange) “What do you think an artist’s job is?”
“To keep our sensibilities alive, so we aren’t numb by our struggles to survive. That’s what I think our job is right now.”
― Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art

“All of me swims, floats, crosses what exists with my nerves, I am nothing but a desire, anger, vagueness, as impalpable as energy. Energy? but where is my strength? in imprecision, in imprecision, in imprecision . .”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“No doubt it was ridiculous to be so sensitive. But there was something almost agonising about speaking and being misunderstood or found unintelligible, something that got right to the heart of all my fears about aloneness. No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can't you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much? It wasn't hard to see why someone in this position might come to mistrust language, doubting its ability to bridge the gap between bodies, traumatised by the revealed gulf, the potentially lethal abyss that lurks beneath each carefully proferred sentence. Dumbness in this context might be a way of evading hurt, dodging the pain of failed communication by refusing to participate in it at all. That's how I explained my growing silence, anyway; as an aversion akin to someone wishing to avoid a repeated electric shock.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“You can’t paint reality: you can only paint your own place in it, the view from your eyes, as manifested by your own hands.”
― Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency