Amira Salah

“I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.”
― Ariana Reines

“What you can imagine depends on what you know.”
― Daniel Dennett

“He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“That is why diplomats smile: it is not hypocrisy - it is a sort of metaphysical awareness of the human impossibility of their task.”
― Charles Malik