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And besides, in the matter of friendship, I have observed that the disappointment here arises chiefly, not from liking our friends too well, or thinking of them too highly, but rather from an over-estimate of their liking for and opinion of us; and that if we guard ourselves with sufficient scrupulousness of care from error in this direction, and can be content, and even happy to give more affection than we receive -- can make just comparison of circumstances, and be severely accurate in drawing inferences thence, and never let self-love blind our eyes -- I think we may manage to get through life with consistency and constancy, unembittered by that misanthropy which springs from revulsions of feeling. All this sounds a little metaphysical, but it is good sense of if you consider it. The moral of it is, that if we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love our friends for their sakes rather than for our own; we must look at their truth to themselves, full as much as their truth to us. In the latter case, every wound to self-love would be a cause of coldness; in the former, only some painful change in the friend's character and disposition -- some fearful breach in his allegiance to his better self -- could alienate the heart. (quoted from a letter by Charlotte Brontë to her publisher) ↗
The abject is evident in the bizarre bodily changes found in films as different as Videodrome (1983) and M Butterfly (1993), both of which focus on mutating or deviant men. Cronenberg’s work at this level achieves a rupture of the categories constituting gender difference: as Williams has it, in these films ‘mutation signals a more pervasive postmodern gender-fuck at work: women conceive without men (The Brood), and men turn themselves into women’. In the ‘fisting’ scene in Videodrome, for example, when Harlan thrusts his arm into Renn’s vagina slit what is attempting is a form of rape. However, the vagina dissolves his arm, and he is left with a bleeding stump, prefiguring the stump of a hand and dissolved ankle which Stathis Borans is left with at the end of The Fly. In Crash (1996), the complexities of this order of conceptualization are developed further, as the question of the boundaries between the inner and outer, the private and the public, of which the male body has been the focus, finds the automobile a new kind of expression. ↗
The man asked me where all my friends were at. I said 'I don't have any friends.' He asked me 'Well, what happened to your friends?' What happened? College and jobs, projects and PowerPoints, money, feelings, priorities, parties and alcohol, distance, pride, cars, music, boyfriends and girlfriends, jealousy, fights, words, opinions, changes, maturation and decadence, lust, hate, drugs, drinking and smoking, hell raising, cursing and spitting, too-much too-little, hear nor there, apologies and mistakes, good decisions and bad decisions.....time.....life. That's what happened. Life. ↗
#friends #life #loneliness #loss #sadness
A text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal. ('The Universal and the Particular')" ... In claiming the lesbian point of view as universal, she overturns the concepts to which we are accustomed. For up to this point, minority writers had to add "the universal" to their points of view if they wished to attain the unquestioned universality of the dominant class. Gay men, for example, have always defined themselves as a minority and never questioned, despite their transgression, the dominant choice. This is why gay culture has always had a fairly wide audience. [From the Foreword "Changing the Point of View" by Louise Turcotte] ↗
My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to the end of being. If he tries, he is submerged within a "private being" which has meaning only for himself. Now there is no meaning for a lone individual: bing alone would of itself reject the "private being" if it saw it as such (if I wish my life to have meaning for me, it is necessary that it have meaning for others: no one would dare give to life a meaning which he alone would perceive, from which life in its entirety would escape, except within himself). At the extreme limit of the "possible", it is true, there is nonsense . . . but only of that which had a prior sense: this is fulguration, even "apotheosis" of nonsense. But I don't attain the extreme limit on my own and, in actual fact, I can't believe the extreme limit attained, for I never remain there. If I had to be the only one having attained it (assuming that I had . . .), it would be as thought it had not occurred. For if there subsisted a satisfaction, as small as I can imagine it to be, it would distance me as much from the extreme limit. I cannot for a moment cease to incite myself to attain the extreme limit, and cannot make a distinction between myself and those with whom I desire to communicate. ~George Bataille, "Inner Experience" pg. 42 ↗
#being #being-yourself #communication #experience #extreme-limit
Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. ↗
#change #freedom #friend #holy #hospitality
Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, bur raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. ↗
