Alexander

“Really good films don't diminish anything, they don't close things off. On the contrary, they open up new insights, they make new thoughts thinkable. They crowd us, they deflate our slovenly lifestyle, our thoughtless way of chattering and pissing away our time and energy and passion. Believe me, films can teach us a huge amount. And they give us a true picture of the way life is."
Mari laughed. "Of our slovenly lifestyle, you mean? You mean, maybe they teach us to piss our lives away with a little more intelligence, a little more elegance?”
― Tove Jansson, Fair Play

“J’ai reçu assez de dons intellectuels pour pouvoir tout sonder, tout aborder, tout saisir en formules claires ; on me croit supérieurement informée de bien des problèmes de la vie ; pourtant, là, tout au fond de moi, il y a une pelote agglutinée, quelque chose me retient dans une poigne de fer, et toute ma clarté de pensée ne m’empêche pas d’être bien souvent une pauvre godiche peureuse.”
― Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943; and Letters from Westerbork

“Instead of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“I want to tell him I love the taste of his words, how they feel rolling around the tongue of my mind’s voice, how they slither down my chest and hum into the caverns of my heart, how they sometimes slide further down and pluck between my legs, where I can no longer distinguish pain from pleasure.”
― Layla AlAmmar, Silence Is a Sense