The fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

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Slim Aaron, Poolside Gossip (1970)

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Pina Bausch, 1980

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Olafur Eliasson, Moss Valley Series (2002)

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I want one thing for each purpose, not all purposes in one thing. Swiss Army knives are never as good at what they need to do as their individual parts would be, alone. Everything is a Swiss Army knife now.

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But the senses, laxly fed, are self-replenishing, Fresh as the first time, so even the eventual Sameness has a savour for you.

from Hannah Sullivan’s ‘You, Very Young in New York’

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Twelfth Streeth and Beyond, Jane Freilicher (1976)

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We all, anyway, work better when we are drunk, or wake up the next morning, hungover. In either case, we lack the capacity to second-guess ourselves.

Sheila Heti, How Should A Person Be

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This artist’s work is so beautiful. I wish we lived in a bartering society. 

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I look upon literature as an art, and I believe that if you misuse it or abuse it, it will leave you. It is not a thing that you can nail down and use as you want. You have to let it use you, too.

Katherine Anne Porter, Paris Review Art of Fiction #29

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Of course she’d thought of me as she lay in the dark and watched—of that year when we were still so young and spoke endlessly of men. How much time we wasted, she wrote, believing that things came to us as gifts, through channels of wonder, in the form of signs, in the love of men, in the name of God, rather than seeing them for what they were: strengths that we dragged up from the nothingness of our own depths.

Nicole Krauss, ‘Seeing Ershadi’

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Made for me.

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I have always had an odd penchant for making things happen. I don’t mean this in a productive sense: I am a case study in attention deficit, my mind is either a thousand places or locked into one, and my to-do lists are a kind of poetry of futility. But when I have a particular vision -- what a woo-woo word, but I can’t think of another that means the same, like the way I think a room should look, or a strong impulse to visit a particular city -- my mind seems to work at some sub-conscious level to create it, and a month or a year later I am looking at that room or that city or that particular evening and it’s almost a kind of deja-vu, I saw this and now it is here. I haven’t yet seen my story. I hope when I do it will be like this.

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Intense people collapse, but they also survive.

A Summer Bird-Cage, Margaret Drabble

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young margaret drabble. planning to co-opt this writing hairstyle.

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What if we shift the question from ‘who do I want to be?’ to the question, ‘what kind of life do I want to live with others?’? It seems to me that then many of the questions you pose about happiness, but perhaps also about ‘the good life’ – very ancient yet urgent philosophical questions – take shape in a new way. If the I who wants this name or seeks to live a certain kind of life is bound up with a ‘you’ and a ‘they’ then we are already involved in a social struggle when we ask how best any of us are to live.

Judith Butler interviewed by Sara Ahmed (via lazz)

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It isn't so much that geniuses make it look easy; it's that they make it look fast.

Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments