Desire/Love Quotes

“there is nothing more alienating than having one’s pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.”
― Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love

“Most people, however, do not experience consciously the benefits of the vicissitudes of their desires. This is in part because they frequently confuse their desire for the comfort and self-development of a reliable love with a desire for a degree of stability and non-ambivalence that live intimacy can rarely sustain.”
― Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love

“where love and desire are concerned, there are no adequate examples; and all of our objects must bear the burden of exemplifying and failing what drives our attachment to them.”
― Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love

“Desire describes a state of attachment to something or someone, and the cloud of possibility that is generated by the gap between an object’s specificity and the needs and promises projected onto it. This gap produces a number of further convolutions. Desire visits you as an impact from the outside, and yet, inducing an encounter with your affects, makes you feel as though it comes from within you; this means that your objects are not objective, but things and scenes that you have converted into propping up your world, and so what seems objective and autonomous in them is partly what your desire has created and therefore is a mirage, a shaky anchor. Your”
― Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love

“Theory, as Gayatri Spivak writes, is at best provisional generalization: I am tracking patterns to enable my readers to see them elsewhere or to not see them, and to invent other explanations. I am interested in lines of continuity and in the ellipsis, with its double meaning of what goes without saying and what has not yet been thought.”
― Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love

“my practice is always to stage incommensurate approaches to a problem/object in order to attend to its instability, density, and openness.”
― Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love