Orwell @orwell - Tumblr Blog

She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.

— Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

polkadotmotmot

Becca Stadtlander - Cards, date unknown

orwell

Penny Slinger photographed with her sculpture ‘Fruit of My Womb’, 1973.

In particular, the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies. There will be plenty of metaphorical wars—corporate lawyers specializing in hostile takeovers who will think of themselves as sharks or gunslingers, and bond traders who imagine, as in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, that they are “masters of the universe.” (They will believe this, however, only in bull markets.) But as they sink into the soft leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America. How long megalothymia will be satisfied with metaphorical wars and symbolic victories is an open question. One suspects that some people will not be satisfied until they prove themselves by that very act that constituted their humanness at the beginning of history: they will want to risk their lives in a violent battle, and thereby prove beyond any shadow of a doubt to themselves and to their fellows that they are free. They will deliberately seek discomfort and sacrifice, because the pain will be the only way they have of proving definitively that they can think well of themselves, that they remain human beings.

— Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

#perilous ease

Shalom Harlow photographed by Arthur Elgort for Vogue Italia, 1993.

#shalom harlow #rifat ozbek

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship.

— Susan Sontag

KUNDUN. I liked it.

#2025 #mood #christopher moltisanti

"...for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

— George Eliot, from Middlemarch

#revisiting #closing lines