Manraj > Manraj's Quotes

“With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”
― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

“There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.”
― Edward W. Said

“Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
― Susan Sontag

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Every tiny molecule of Ash is in motion with my heat I am such a Lunatic that I am free even in Jail.”
― Bhagat Singh

“Merciless criticism and independent thinking are the two necessary traits of revolutionary thinking.”
― Bhagat Singh

“We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.
We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.
We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;
It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free.
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability!”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea
What are all these kissings worth -
If thou kiss not me?”
― Percy Shelley

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes

“Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.”
― Langston Hughes

“Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”
― Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“How many summers had I been alive? The obvious answer was as many summers as my age; but for some reason I felt the presence of another number, a different, realer number somewhere out there in the world. I thought about this as I gazed into the summer glare.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“Why do people see no harm in having children? They do it with smiles on their faces, as if it’s not an act of violence. You force this other being into the world, this other being that never asked to be born. You do this absurd thing because that’s what you want for yourself, and that doesn’t make any sense.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“My monolithic expectation of what a woman’s body was supposed to look like had no bearing on what actually happened to my body. The two things were wholly unrelated. I never became the woman I imagined. And what was I expecting?”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“What had come over me? The whole day I'd been running through old memories, getting lost in my own thoughts. But I guess that made sense. It was only natural. Despite Makiko being, in the present, my closest living relative, the bulk of our shared experiences were in the past, from another planet. In that sense, spending time with Makiko meant living in the past.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“We are self-caring our way to fascism,”
― Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

“Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it --- on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.”
― Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

“[the abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the "I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.”
― Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

“What is it to inhabit a world?
How does one make the world one's own?
What is it to lose one's world?”
― Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

“Are we, intellectual sirs, not actively or passively 'producing' more and more words, more books, more articles, ceaselessly refilling the pot-boiler of speech, gorging ourselves on it rather, seizing books and 'experiences', to metamorphose them as quickly as possible into other words, plugging us in here, being plugged in there, just like Mina on her blue squared oilcloth, extending the market and the trade in words of course, but also multiplying the chances of jouissance, scraping up intensities wherever possible, and never being sufficiently dead, for we too are required to go from forty to the hundred a day, and we will never play the whore enough, we will never be dead enough”
― Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy

“Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with lashes - but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit ; as though your dress maker' s scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestines' alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats' wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when you're sunbathing or taking grass.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy

“Our eyes are not capable of seeing, nor even contemplating, intimacy, at least not directly. They can only imagine something about intimacy from the light, the gestures, the words, that it radiates. But intimacy as such will remain invisible, irreducible to appropriation, and thus strange to the logic of Western discourse, to the logos, except in its delusion its lack, its derelictions and artificial ecstasies. Intimacy allows itself neither to be seen nor to be seized. Nevertheless it is probably the core of our being. And any attempts to appropriate it risks annihilating being itself. However, it is not a question of magic, of irrationality, of madness--it is a question of touch.”
― Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World