Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it’s the whole society.
The only ideals allowed are healthy ones – those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
It’s hard not to be afraid. Be less afraid.
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.
Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples.
I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.
Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.
I don’t consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.
A personality is our way of being for others. We hope that others will meet us half way or more, gratify our needs, be our audience, soothe our fears.
Art is seduction, not rape.
A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.
Etymologically, ‘patient’ means sufferer.
Love is friendship on fire – anonymous.
The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
I guess I think I’m writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I’ll be doing something that’s worth their time. I’d be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Try not to live in a linguistic slum.
The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.