Ana > Recent Status Updates

'It is thus that those beings especially gifted by nature often provoke their destiny, boldly and thoughtlessly.'

'The air smelt of fresh melons and roasting coffee. From the great flagstones, still warm from the day's heat, and sprinkled with water, rose moist and scented the special smell of the kapia which filled men with freedom from care and evoked lively fancies.'

'Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.'

'In Lockean liberalism, legitimate ownership of land is established through labor, by making land productive. This principle has historically formed a legitimating basis to expel or expropriate indigenous territory, because the natives can be deemed nonproductive (Wolfe 2016a).'

'Tamir saw himself, not as a political being relating to a political victim, but as someone merely powerlessly ensnared in a bewildering war. That he, like his neighbors, "doesn't understand" what happened effectively asserts innocence, a disavowal of his role in settler colonialism...Here the narrator simultaneously exists inside and outside reality or in two different realities.'

'But, the rural peripheries, where the majority of Palestinians lived, remain understudied. One important reason is the scarcity of archival material about this area. But this has changed in the last decade, due in part to the development of the methodology of oral history and its legitimacy in Palestine studies.'

'Within the field of settler colonial occupation, security thus operates as the supreme mechanism that constitutes and is recursively constituted by the struggle over settlement.'

'Juarez had dozens of names, even Juarez wasn't his real name, not that he needed a name, so long as he had something to chew on.'

'The International Brigades now had their first rest from action. The volunteers had discovered in battle that "a war of ideas" is much the same as any other conflict. In Spain as elsewhere there was confusion of orders, jamming of rifles at the critical moment, uncertainty about the whereabouts of the enemy and of headquarters, desire for cigarettes (or sweet-tasting things), fatigue, occasional hysteria.'

'In Valencia the population ate well throughout the war and visitors were often served with ten different hors d'oeuvres and ten courses, but in Madrid meat was almost unknown. Foreign visitors ate horse meat, though Hemingway once procured three tins of caviare and half a camembert at the Hotel Florida.'

'"It isn't right for a mortal to try to understand in his mind or express with his words all the tools of divine workmanship."'

'"Each blessed man is therefore a god, but indeed in nature God is one; by participation there is nothing to prevent there being as many gods as you like."'

'The only good there is in nobility, I think, is this: noble men seem obliged to live up to the virtue of their ancestors.'

'"Although it is the nature of other animals not to know themselves, such ignorance proves to be a vice in man."'

'"Consider also that the most delicate emotions are those of happy men. Unless everything works according to their whim, they are overthrown by every little trouble, unaccustomed as they are to adversity. And so, things of the least importance can bring down the very lucky man from his 'great bliss.'"'

'What difference do you suppose it makes then whether you desert Fortune by dying or she deserts you by fleeing?'

'Maybe it was time to stop making longing a lover. Maybe it was time to get out of the rain. Katla.'

'The American Enlightenment reverence for science had been greatly influenced by the German ideal of the university as a place for both research and the cultivation of character through humanistic education.'

I'm enjoying this book in much the same way I've enjoyed the others, very uplifting. But it's really hard to read Electra's internalized anti-Blackness as written by this author, it's like it comes from a place of the author wanting to indicate she grew up so privileged she never knew racism and yet also with the white beauty standards of Swiss society? I'm not even sure that's intentional. But it's painful to read

« Toute la vie, nous gardons le désir d'imposer l'immobilité de la pierre au monde hostile, à l'ennemi étonné. »

« Nous ne dormons jamais tout entiers, c'est pourquoi nous rêvons toujours. »

« Des temps sont venus, plus sincères, où nous fuyons tout ce qui est systématique et artificiel. »

« Ces clameurs aphones ne disent-elles pas toute la rage arrêtée par l'excès de son hostilité ? »

«Mais qui provoque ? La raison répond : c'est naturellement l'Ocean.»

«Dans l'ordre de l'imagination dynamique, tout est bien qui commence bien.»

«La littérature pensée fait tort à la littérature imaginée. Elle interprète le caractère humain, elle cesse de participer activement à la vie des images.»

«Quand des métaphores sont réversibles, on est bien sûr de vivre en état de grâce d'imagination.»

«Un grand songeur voit le ciel sur la terre, un ciel livide, un ciel écroulé. L'amas des roches a toutes les menaces d'un ciel d'orage. Dans le monde le plus stable, le rêveur se demande alors : que va-t-il arriver ?»

«Nous ne concevons guère de Création sans une pâte à modeler.»

«Dis-moi comment tu imagines le forgeron et je saurai de quel cœur tu te mets à l'ouvrage.»