I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.
I know I am made from this earth, as my mother’s hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth.
Society, like nature, is one body, really.
The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change.
Each life reverberates in every other life. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we are connected, woven together in our needs and desires, rich and poor, men and women alike.
In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.
How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.
Yes we are devilish; that is true we cackle. Yes we are dark like the soil and wild like the animals. And we turn to each other and stare into this darkness. We find it beautiful. We find this darkness irresistible. We cease all hiding.
What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.
Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.
Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count.
We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know.
Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
Waging war is not a primary physical need.
War starts in the mind, not in the body.
It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.
Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.
One can find traces of every life in each life.
Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight is a masterpiece of complex an nuanced thinking not only about a significant problem that faces women but about our culture. A very valuable book.