nicole > Recent Status Updates

"Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures." BOOOOPPPPPP

"To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd."

"When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences."

"In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, (...) such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a black fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love."

"(...) when we begin to live from within outward,(...) we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognise our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self (...)".

"When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, (...) then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual's."

Too many bangers on this para need to split it into two updates 😭😭😭

"(That) self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge (...) comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife."

"It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies."

"The erotic has been misnamed by men and used against women. (...) For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling."

"If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly towards and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core - the fountain - of our power, our womaness; we give up the future of our worlds.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt (...) - while we suffer the old longings (...), while we taste new possibilities and strengths."

"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."

"Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it i wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? (...) It's easy to decieve oneself on all these scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself."

"There've been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect
that it's going to happen." He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. "Here you know it's not going to."
I ask what it is that is supposed to happen.
"I don't know," he says, "Something. Anything."'

"Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is twenty-three, was raised in Virginia, and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end."

READ HIM COSIMA

"I felt the disparity between Hollywood and Europe in that moment; a dismissal or indication that he had shared as much as he had the stomach for. I was no more than a serf, or a lesser angel tending unreliable gods."

"You can be more(...). You are more. Believe that."

"It would take too much (...). More than I want to give. Here's the thing. You can live in your head or you can be happy. Too much of life is given to analysis. (...) That's not to say I want to live blindly, maestro, more than you have to give yourself up to the day in order to live it."

"You cannot make films if you're unable to speak or to accept the presence of other human beings. Without those things youre simply creating art installations, important in themselves, but they are not cinema, and that is what I'm here to teach you."

"It piqued my interest as much as the book: how she spent her days, how she lived. She wove her biography through all aspects of her work in such a way that was impossible not to pry. Those who create art from what is private must accept this, as I long since had. The question was, did she?"

"The value of the year has accumulated without her realising. The artwork feels like a peeled scab in her hands, its ugliness and purpose necessary. Under this, her skin is renewed." (okay bars...wow)

the queer yearning is crazy i'm kind of living 😭😭😭

the intro pages were kind of giving gone girl monologue but yk what i'm getting into the immersion rn we're sympathising

"The International Court of Justice ruled on July 19, 2024 that the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal. Yet, both local and international/Western media continue to use the term Israel-Hamas instead of Israel-Palestine. To conflate the Palestinian cause with Hamas has the insidious effect of delegitimising the former, since it would then be primarily associated with terrorism."

"I wanted to tell him that he'd been wrong about Katie. She wasn't a nobody. Katie and I had been friends. Good friends, even. The memory of it, that it had happened, was worth something to me. I wanted to tell him that, but then he told me there was mould on the walls again and that I'd let it get out of hand." AAAAA

eating these uppppp these stories are so good

loving the first two stories (how to pronounce knife and paris)!!