saflori > Recent Status Updates

‘Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. It means misleading information-misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.‘

"We are not speaking ill of them out of envy, but out of respect for the truth. If men usurp our rights, should we not complain and declare that they have wronged us? (…) It has become so entrenched that they claim (and even actually believe) that the status they have gained through their bullying is theirs by right.”

‘Lesbia always speaks ill of me, and is always talking about me. May I perish if Lesbia does not love me. By what token? because it is just the same with me. I am perpetually crying out upon her, but may I perish if I do not love her.’

‘But beyond these always she who is dearer to me than all else, my light & my eyes who, living, invests life for Catullus with its sweet reason.’

(She who makes life sweet for him to live in).

‘And when I shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.’

‘When the life you’re born into is unbearable, and the life you want is out of reach, despair is the only thing you have left.’

‘But I have loved the creature more than thee,
loving it for its own sake. What is sin but to
cling to that sort of love? Of a truth he who loves the creature for its own sake, makes the creature his god.’

‘Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with loving tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet, A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.’

“It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of the past is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can then denounce for our own (frequently political) motives - an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them.”

‘ "It's impossible!" he would insist. "Women cannot cooperate-it's against nature." We urged the obvious facts: Just show me a combination of male creatures, bird, bug, or beast, that works as well, will you? Or one of our masculine countries where the people work together as well as they do here! I tell you, women are the natural co-operators, not men!" ‘

‘These women, whose idea of motherhood was the dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly deficient in what we call "femininity." This led me very promptly to the conviction that those "feminine charms" we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.‘

“ 'I wish we could go there together,' said Sabina.
Alan looked at her reproachfully as if it hurt him to be obliged to remind her: ‘I can't leave my work. Later this year perhaps...’ Later was always too late; date did not exist. There was only great distance to overcome to reach the inaccessible. “

“Certain roads one took emotionally also appeared on the map of the heart as travelling away from the centre, and ultimately leading to exile.”

Her denial of ordinary life had a purpose: to send her off like a rocket into other forms of existence. Rebellion was merely the electric friction accumulating a charge of power that would launch her into space.

“For a moment she saw her love anxieties as resembling those of a drug addict, of alcoholics, of gamblers. The same irresistible impulse, tension, compulsion and then depression following the yielding to the impulse, revulsion, bitterness, depression, and the compulsion once more…”

‘Spirit is tangled into the very threads of our flesh. In some mysterious way, the body and the soul are nearly one. And yet, Love keeps reaching for the soul beneath the skin, often with quiet grief. When both the seeker and the sought are searching for each other, even the hardest battles are softened. But alas, the deepest part of the soul can never be fully seen—not even by love—not even by love.’

‘What folly were the violet to envy the rose!’

Renaissance Italy was brutal, even amongst the general public (maybe that’s a no-brainer, but I didn’t realise it was this violent). Reading what the public did to the bodies of murdered scorned citizens had me like… what kind of animalistic and deprived hell am I reading about? It’s as though they were no longer a human being just because they were disliked and dead. Is humanity even above this sh*t now?

why do I always feel like venting on this app?

goddamn idk why I'm depressed and all

“It is but the reflection of himself in his mistress that many a foolish lover loves.”

“Little as people seem to be aware of it, love requires constant replenishing: no flame can burn without a feeding oil, no pool overflow without a purling brook. Yet the first ecstasies of love often blind both lover and lass to the care necessary for the nurture of love. Indeed, too many treat love as if it were a passing whim; whereas in sober reality it is (or should be) a lasting emotion.”

‘What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.’

Why am I so bored