Avery > Avery's Quotes

“Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition.”
― Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”
― Michel Foucault

“bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.”
― Antonin Artaud

“I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.”
― Johann Sebastian Bach

“Where there is devotional music, God is always at hand with His gracious presence.”
― Johannes Sebastian Bach

“Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.”
― Johann Sebastian Bach

“In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends.”
― Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea

“Tea ... is a religion of the art of life.”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“An army of the people is invincible!”
― Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.”
― Ezra Pound

“Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.”
― François Truffaut

“All readings are also mis-readings, re-readings, partial readings, imposed readings, and imagined readings of a text that is originally and finally never simply there. Just as the world is originally fallen apart, the text is always already enmeshed in contending practices and hopes.”
― Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature