I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls.
We all start out the same in our mothers’ wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn’t swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around.
In order to be accepted, women must compensate for their ambition and strength by being nice. Men don’t have to be nearly as much d as women. I do not believe women are natively nicer than men. They may learn that niceness brings rewards and hat names ambition is often punished. They may ingratiate themselves because such behavior is rewarded and a strategy of stealth may lead to better results than being forthright, but even when women are open and direct, they are not always seen or heard.
My purely practical advice: Don’t get excited. Don’t raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry.
Six months isn’t such a long time. That’s how long it’s been since I came to see you in May, but the fact is it’s been much longer than that. We’ve spent years living inside each other.
Medicine had granted permission to a fantasy that men have never abandoned, a muddled version of what Pygmalion wanted – something between a real woman and a beautiful thing.
But spectacular lies don’t need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar’s skill than on the listener’s expectations and wishes. After Mark’s dishonesty was exposed, I understood how much I wised that what he had told me had been true.
All thoughts of revenge are born of the pain of helplessness. ‘I suffer’ becomes ‘You will suffer’. And let us not lie: Vengeance is invigorating. It focuses and enlivens us, and it quashes grief because it turns the emotion outward. In grief we go to pieces. In revenge we come together as a single pointed weapon aimed at a target. However destructive in the long run, it serves a useful purpose for a time.
Drowning, she clung fiercely to that small, splintered piece of mast bobbing in the ocean we call justice. There is no justice, of course, or very little of it, and counting on it as a life raft is a big mistake.
Emotion is always part of perception, not distinct from it.
Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?
Tolerating cracks is part of being alive.
He hunched his shoulders and looked at the floor. With that movement, he entered the past. When he put on his jacket, kissed me again, and walked to the door, he was already a memory.
As John Ashbery once said, “Being a famous poet is the not the same thing as being famous.
Being alive is inexplicable, I thought. Consciousness itself is inexplicable. There is nothing ordinary in the world.
El amor es la cura, pero el odio a menudo forma parte del proceso.
First loves are often terrible, probably because they are first and there is no conscious history into which they may be absorbed.
His was an illness that besets the intellectual: the indefatigable will to mastery. Chronic and incurable, it afflicts those who lust after a world that makes sense.
Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want.
I’ve decided that mixing is a key term. It’s better than suggestion, which is one-sided. It explains what people rarely talk about, because we define ourselves as isolated, closed bodies who bump up against each other but stay shut. Descartes was wrong. It isn’t: I think, there I am. It’s: I am because you are. That’s Hegel – well, the short version.