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“In his book Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre probes the connection between one’s being and one’s actions. Are we defined by what we do? Are we defined by the projects we undertake? Are a woman and a man simply what they do, or is there a difference, a gap, between the truth of who we are and our actions? Your life proves that we are not what we do, but rather that we are what we haven’t done, because the world, or society, stood in our way. Because verdicts, as Didier Eribon calls them, came crashing down on us – gay, trans, female, black, poor – and made certain lives, certain experiences, certain dreams, inaccessible to us.”
― Édouard Louis, Who Killed My Father

“For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other’s hearts. I guess there’s other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You’re always home.”
― Eileen Myles