Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.
The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.
Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.
Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the animation, the fits.
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.
Life is not significant details, illuminated by a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
Courage is morally neutral.
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.
With more people, there are more voices to tune out.
Translation is the circulatory system of the world’s literatures.
In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.