[25436445767787687676786-deactiv]

Don’t think that a person has the strength to lead any kind of life and stay the same… I don’t know how to explain my soul to you. But what I mean is that we are very precious, and that there’s only so much you can give up of yourself for the sake of other people and circumstances. All I planned to do was tell you about my new character, or lack of character… Darling, almost four years have greatly transformed me. From the moment I resigned myself, I lost all my vivacity and all my interest in things. Have you seen the way a castrated bull turns into an ox? That is what happened to me… despite the hard comparison…

To adapt to something I can’t adapt to, to get over my dislikes and my dreams, I had to cut off my fetters—I cut off inside me the way I could hurt others and myself. And at the same time I cut off my strength. I hope you never see me resigned like this, because it’s almost repugnant… One day, a friend filled herself with courage, as she said, and asked me: “You were really different, weren’t you?” She said she thought I had been passionate and lively, and that when she met me here she thought: either this excessive calm is a pose or she’s changed so much that she’s almost unrecognizable. Someone else told me that I move with the lassitude of a fifty-year-old woman… which can happen with someone who has made a pact with everyone, and who forgot that the vital center of a person has to be respected. 

Listen: respect even the bad parts of yourself—respect above all the bad parts of yourself—for the love of God, don’t try to make yourself perfect—don’t copy an ideal, copy yourself—that is the only way to live.

Clarice Lispector in a letter to her sister Tania, as quoted in Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser.

[arterialtrees]

from leslie jamison’s the empathy exams 

[inagrayroom]

People seek a central point: that is hard, and not even right. I should think a rich, manifold life, brought close to our eyes, would be enough without any express tendency; which, after all, is only for the intellect.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[inagrayroom]

“Now,” she said, startlingly down to business, "tell me what you expect from life. Fame and fortune aside–those we take for granted.” I said, “I don’t know what I expect. I know what I’d like. And that is to be a grown-up person.” Colette’s painted eyelids lifted and lowered like the slowly beating wings of a great blue eagle. “But that,” she said, “is the one thing none of us can ever be: a grown-up person. If you mean a spirit clothed in the sack and ash of wisdom alone? Free of all mischief–envy and malice and greed and guilt? Impossible. Voltaire, even Voltaire, lived with a child inside him, jealous and angry, a smutty little boy always smelling his fingers. Voltaire carried that child to the grave, as we all will to our own. The pope on his balcony…dreaming of a pretty face among the Swiss Guard. And the exquisitely wigged British judge, what is he thinking as he sends a man to the gallows? Of justice and eternity and mature matters? Or is he possibly wondering how he can manage election to the Jockey Club? Of course, men have grown-up moments, a noble few scattered here and there, and of these, obviously death is the most important. Death certainly sends that smutty little boy scuttling and leaves what’s left of us simply an object, lifeless but pure, like The White Rose. Here”–she nudged the flowered crystal toward me [a paperweight to which he makes an earlier reference]–“drop that in your pocket. Keep it as a reminder that to be durable and perfect, to be in fact grown-up, is to be an object, an altar, the figure in a stained-glass window: cherishable stuff. But really, it is so much better to sneeze and feel human.

Answered Prayers, Truman Capote

[inagrayroom]

We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known ... we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination we shall find a God. And where we had thought to slay another we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outwards we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world.

Joseph Campbell

[sheholdsyoucaptivated]

me socializing

[sadladypoetssociety]

anne sexton, the fierceness of female [excerpt]

[sadladypoetssociety]

anne sexton, the big boots of pain [excerpts]

[socimages]

Nope!

Brain studies find that concern for justice and equality is linked to logic, not emotion.

By Lisa Wade, PhD

A new study finds that people with high “justice sensitivity” are using logic, not emotions.  Subjects were put in a fMRI machine, one that measures ongoing brain activity and shown videos of people acting kindly or cruelly toward a homeless person.

Some respondents reacted more strongly than others — hence the high versus low justice sensitivity — and an analysis of the high sensitivity individuals’ brain activity showed that they were processing the images in the parts of the brain where logic and rationality live.   “Individuals who are sensitive to justice and fairness do not seem to be emotionally driven,” explained one of the scientists, “Rather, they are cognitively driven.”

Activists aren’t angry, they reasonably object to unjust circumstances that they understand all too well.

Image borrowed from Jamie Keiles at Teenagerie, who is a high sensitivity individual.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions, with Myra Marx Ferree. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

[safeword]

this is shit we already knew but now i have a citation 2 link 2 next time yr in an internet fight

go get ‘em kids!!!

[terffighter]

Due to this new development, it turns out Mod Ford is not as angry as previously anticipated.

- Mod Ford.

[dappledwithshadow]

James Ensor’s house in Ostend.

[buttonpoetry]

Guante - “Small Talk” “I am pulling myself from the magician’s hat night after night and I have the scars to prove it.” Don’t miss this brilliant poem, part of our countdown of the top-viewed poems of 2016.

[naturaekos]

How do you move on? You move on when your heart finally understands that there is no turning back.

J.R.R. Tolkien (via naturaekos)

[inagrayroom]

"What is a theory but a tentacle reaching for a wafer of reason."

For our figurative Fin de siècle

[antigonick]

we look at each other, we exchange dark words, we love each other like poppy and recollection, we sleep like wine in the conches, like the sea in the moon’s blood ray.

Paul Celan, excerpt of Corona (tr. by Michael Hamburger)

Original — wir sehen uns an, wir sagen uns Dunkles, wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis, wir schlafen wie Wein in den Muscheln, wie das Meer im Blutstrahl des Mondes.

(via stoicremains)

[gnossienne]

from Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000)

[soracities]

I am afraid. Of what? Life without having lived, chiefly.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals, 1950-1962 (via artannis)

[inagrayroom]

You have not an hour to lose. You must take your places in Life's fighting line. Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Don't be content with things as they are. "The earth is yours and the fuleness thereof." Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities. Raise the glorious flags again, advance them upon the new enemies, who constantly gather upon the front of the human army, and have only to be assaulted to be overthrown. Don't take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.

Winston Churchill My Early Life, 1874-1904 Chapter 4, p60