ivan > ivan's Quotes

“Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.”
― Hakim Bey, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone

“Guerrillas of Desire' offers a contentious hypothesis: the fundamental assumptions underlying Left and radical organizing, including many strains of anarchism, is wrong. I do not mean organizationally dishonest, ideologically inappropriate, or immoral. I mean empirically incorrect. ... Strategies ... are predicated on the assumption that working class and poor people are unorganized and not resisting. Illustrating that everyday resistance is a factor in revolution and a form of politics, maintaining that its effects on overt rebellion and crises are measureable, requires the reversal of this assumption. Working class and poor people ... are already organized and resisting.”
― Kevin Van Meter, Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible

“I believe there's something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I'm all for violence. It's the only thing Americans understand.”
― Gore Vidal

“What I will also say is that women are magicians. I don't mean magic like the kind you were warned to avoid, I mean magic as in spinning story as lifeline, as in turning a wound into a star, as in holding an apocalypse in your core and smiling believably.”
― Eloghosa Osunde, Vagabonds!

“So, a boy stands, then kneels in a pool of moonlight at midnight in his parents’ garden, asking God to kill him for being him. Then he looks up and God says a decisive no with not just one, but all the beautiful mouths They have. That’s it, that’s the story. And the lesson, love, is this: If your own god keeps failing you, God can show you another.”
― Eloghosa Osunde, Vagabonds!