#cap

What are you thinking?” he asked in a disarmingly gentle tone. “That the city looks different depending on whom I’m seeing it with.” He nodded easily, as if this same thought had occurred to him. “I notice different things,” I continued. “Like with you, I pay more attention to the details of the buildings – the textures, the colors, the people standing in front of them. The reflections are different.” “Reflections?” he asked quietly. “They are.” I watched our bodies morph and distort in the window of an empty bank. “You’re there,” I said. “That’s how they’re different. ↗

— Jessica Hawkins

#chicago #city #romance #the-cityscape-series #architecture

I just find it fascinating, like everybody, to be in a different life. It's an escape. ↗

— Elizabeth McGovern

#escape #everybody #fascinating #find #i

Scapegrace leaped up. “I am the Killer Supreme! I make murder into an art form!” Skulduggery hit him again and Scapegrace did a little twirl before falling. ↗

— Derek Landy

#scapegrace #skulduggery #twirl #art

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#capitalism #humnaity #life #mankind #money

[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy. (pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America") ↗

— Wendell Berry

#excellence #genesis #joy #love #salvation

We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. (pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America") ↗

— Wendell Berry

#product #work #art

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#capitalist #literature #state #subversive #art

Because you live to love and love to live/ And because of what your heardrum will give/ Now we might love to live and live to love. ↗

— Janet Goodfriend

#best #book-club #cape-cod #character #community

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#flight #art

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege. ↗

— Thomas Mann

#beauty #bias #bourgeois #capitalism #creativity