I have the same opinion of dances that physicians have of mushrooms: the best of them are good for nothing.
To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
There is always a. . belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs
Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable. Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition. When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling andor unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
Since 1873, I have been back four or five times. I have used the best cameras and the most sensitive emulsions on the market. I have snapped my shutter, morning, noon and afternoon. I have never come close to matching those first plates. (On photographing The Mountain of the Holy Cross)
When a man plans, a woman laughs.
The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.
Everyone has the right to live in a great place. More importantly, everyone has the right to contribute to making the place where they already live great.