Pesky Loves

Often when I'm reading, I have to write some of it down.

[blackflypassages]

Sometimes the things you wanted most and didn't get are terrible things you've been delivered from.

-Min Jin Lee, Testing

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Something someone else said here.

-Tumblr

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America I’ve given you all and I’m nothing.

-Allen Ginsberg, America

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If then, this art is about something, what is it about? Each artist has his notion; so does every spectator.

-Elaine de Kooning

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Life is so meaningless we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary.

-Francis Bacon, in conversation

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Now it seems cruel, abusive even, but this all happened before the invention of self-esteem, which, frankly, I think is a little overrated.

-David Sedaris, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

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“I take the liberty to play on any string of my existence,” Rothko told [Helen Frankenthaler]. “Everything is grist for the mill.”

-From Mary Gabriel's Ninth Street Women

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She wondered if it was in her blood, her cells, her DNA, this inability to be satisfied with what she had.

-J. Courtney Sullivan, Friends and Strangers

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Art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all. It’s the product of leisure time. Our big brains, the most complex instruments known in the universe, have been released from the vigilance of evading predators and seeking sustenance, permitting our imagination to gambol and explore, to dream while awake, to share visions of God. Art signals our freedom. It exists because we’ve won the evolutionary war.

-Michael Finkel, The Art Thief

[blackflypassages]

Each person does the amount of lying that is right for them. You have to know yourself and fulfill the amount of untruth that your constitution requires.

-Miranda July, All Fours

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Even casual acquaintances could feel [Frank O’Hara’s] ‘our’ about New York City. He lived in the glamorous swirl the gifted lonely can invent in a great city. -Martha King

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What if, temperamentally, your friend and rival was simply better equipped for success?

-Sebastian Smee, The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art

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It was her way of drawing a line between them and herself, playing the observer so she didn’t have to care whether or not she fit in. She’d been doing it all her life. Andrew said she was like this because she was a writer, but he had that backward; she was a writer because she was like this.

-J. Courtney Sullivan, Friends and Strangers

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Make believe you are glad when you’re sorry.

-Paula McLain, The Paris Wife

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But the randomness that can kill you will also save you.

-Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying

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Of course if you’re knitting for years the sweater eventually becomes so huge that it simply can’t be hidden.

-Miranda July, All Fours

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Why have I spent so long settling for less when I know damn well the world expects more?

-Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo