Kaplan > Kaplan's Quotes

“It is impossible to grieve in the first-person singular. We always grieve for someone and with someone. Grieving connects us in ways that are subtly and candidly material. I am not yet sure which group I should join, where to envision myself, on whose shoulder to cry.”
― Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country

“Anything can be tarnished by association, and if you have enough associations you can blacken the world.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Wherefore with my utmost art
I will sing thee,
And the cream of all my heart
I will bring thee.”
― George Herbert, George Herbert: The Complete English Poems

“The rematerialization of our worlds in times of deceleration forces questions that are political at their very root: Who else has touched this object that I am touching? Which is another way of asking: Where does it come from, who produces it, in what conditions of exploitation or sanitation is this thing in my hands created, with what quantity of virus?”
― Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country

“Welfare-state ideology foreclosed philanthropy, the traditional face-saver of the idle rich, and there was nothing left but the aura of spiritual election that in our time art alone has seemed able to confer.”
― Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings, 1978-1990

“Like a giant X-ray, the deceleration the pandemic has brought makes clear, or even exaggerates, what was already present: an economic system guided by profit at the expense of everything else and a Visceraless State—that is, a state for which bodies are not a matter of care but merely extraction.”
― Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country

“It shall come to pass that the fury / of a token revolution will fade / ... / the movement organizations already / await their monthly checks from Downtown”
― Conrad Kent Rivers, The Still Voice of Harlem

“The internet is always on, interaction always available, but it could not guarantee I would be able to interact with someone I liked and understood, or who (I thought) liked and understood me. I’d gotten used to using people I’d never met, or met a few times, to muffle the sound of time passing without transcendence or joy or any of the good emotions I wanted to experience during my life, and I knew the feeling was mutual, and that was the comfort in it. It was compared to white noise so often for a reason: so many people, talking, mumbling, murmuring, muttering, suggesting, gently reminding, chiming in, jumping in, just wanting to add, just reminding, just asking, just wondering, just letting that sink in, just telling, just saying, just wanting to say, just screaming, just *whispering*, in all lowercase letters, in all caps, with punctuation, with no punctuation, with photos, with GIFs, with related links, Pay attention to me!”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“There were so many people in bad moods at any given time; all we had to do was find each other. We could pretend something good, connection, had come of our turning to technology to deal with boredom, loneliness, rejection, heartbreak, irrational rage, Weltschmerz, ennui, frustration with the writing process. We were all self-centered together, supporting each other up as we propped up the social media companies.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“That people kill themselves because of my books won’t stop me from writing. If people turned into reactionaries, political assholes after reading me, yes, that would stop me from writing, but not if they killed themselves.”
― Marguerite Duras, Me & Other Writing

“Anyway, the message I got in the yoga class was that everyone was going to the protest.”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“Literature isn't true/ It's just something that we do”
― Susanne Christensen

“I was in a milieu that never looked to literary critics for what to read. When I happened upon reviews of the books I had read after the fact, I didn’t recognize my reading experience. Criticism, especially written, journalistic, kills the book it portrays. To keep the book from obstructing the critic’s operation, the review immobilizes the book, puts it to sleep, distances it and kills it without understanding it, and it remains killed by the reading of the story. All literary criticism is lethal because we are not forced to read anything. And so we linger in the corridors of literature. But the book remains dead.”
― Marguerite Duras, Me & Other Writing

“He eventually became an executive for a firm. This meant that he actually executed persons with showers of legal documents proving that they owed him quantities of money which they did not have. 'Firm' actually means the manufacture of useless objects which people are foolish enough to buy. The firmer the firm the more senseless talk is needed to prevent anyone noticing the unsafe structure of the business. Sometimes these firms actually sell nothing at all for a lot of money, like 'Life Insurance', a pretense that it is a soothing and useful event to have a violent and painful death.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

“I am a face myself. The quickest way of retiring from social Face-eating competition occurred to me when I attacked a policeman with my strong steel umbrella. I was quickly put into prison, where I spent months of health-giving meditation and compulsive exercise.
My exemplary conduct in prison moved the Head Wardress to an excess of bounty, and that is how the Government presented me with the island, after a small and distinguished ceremony in a remote corner of the Protestant Cemetery.
So here I am on the island with all sizes of mechanical artifacts whizzing by in every conceivable direction, even overhead.
Here I sit.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

“Universities need the humanities to define themselves as nonprofit…. Universities need their nonprofit status to accumulate and produce value in the manner that they do. They must remain corporate and nonprofit simultaneously, and the humanities provide the possibility of their perceived valuelessness.”
― Leigh Claire La Berge

“Universities today loudly proclaim their commitment to diversity. But in the meantime, democratization through public investment has been replaced by democratization through consumer credit, effectively transferring the costs of diversity back to the individual student and her family. The beauty of securitized credit is that it excludes no one a priori. By abstracting from class stratification in the present, it can accommodate all differences preemptively simply by pricing them at variable rates and deferring repayment to some barely imaginable point in the future. In principle, we all have access to a college education, no matter how much we or our parents earn. Yet, private credit does not merely obscure the effects of class; it also actively exacerbates inequality by forcing those without income or collateral to pay higher rates for the same service. When the long-term costs of credit begin to materialize and accumulate, students are once again confronted with the intractable resistances of class, race, and gender stratification. The divisions of family wealth reassert themselves with all their historical force.”
― Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism

“an architecturally sublime honey trap for boomers”
― Elizabeth Catte, Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia

“I was the synchronizer of the watches.”
― James Baldwin, Just Above My Head

“everyone knows white people hate typos”
― Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, This Accident of Being Lost: Songs and Stories

“I was not, except in some very broken-down sense of that ambiguous term, a love child. I was a word child.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Word Child

“Those who understood our cultural moment saw that selling out—corporate positions, partnerships, sponsors—would become our generation’s premier aspiration, the best way to get paid.”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“They used to advise young men to avoid gambling, drink, and women. And they were probably right in their time. But the single most important thing in the world today is not to read The New Yorker.”
― George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers

“I think always about the thing in which we are. Among the things in it is force, power. It is not enough to say that we like it or that we do not like it. It is here, we must first talk about it. We are not shoppers—or we are not first of all shoppers; it is not enough to say that we like or we do not like—”
― George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers