sheryl marie anaya

photographer, installation artist, www.sherylanaya.com

[sherylanaya]

Why Our Partners Drive Us Mad: Philosopher Alain de Botton to the Central Foible of the Human Heart and How to Heal It

“We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity.”

[sherylanaya]

When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness. Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.

Nhat Hanh

[theparisreview]

When you’re working very hard you’re not lonely; you are the whole damn world.

Shelby Foote, The Art of Fiction No. 158 (via theparisreview)

[sherylanaya]

Tracey Emin

The Last Great Adventure is you

neon

2013

[sherylanaya]

Tracey Emin

You Loved me like a distant Star

2012

neon

[sherylanaya]

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

Adrienne Rich

[sherylanaya]

Tracey Emin 

My Heart is with you Always

2014

neon

[sherylanaya]

Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you ever wanted.

Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

[sherylanaya]

Sophie Barbasch

From, The Source of Heat

[sherylanaya]

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

Joan Didion, in a 1975 commencement address at the University of California, Riverside.

[sherylanaya]

Porque sin buscarte ando encontrándote por todos lados, principalmente cuando cierro los ojos.

Julio Cortázar

[sherylanaya]

Jenny Holzer

[sherylanaya]

Sweetwater

Kelli Connell

[sherylanaya]

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy

Virgina Woolf, from Orlando

[sherylanaya]

Anne

from the series, Random Letters to Ransom Girls

Tammy Rae Carland

[sherylanaya]

Love Letters

from the series, Archive of Feelings

Tammy Rae Carland

[sherylanaya]

It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.

Adrienne Rich