"The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."
"I can live on sunlight falling across little bridges. I can live on the Botticelli-blue cornflower pattern on the out-billowing garments of the attendant to Aphrodite and the pattern of strawberry blossoms and the little daisies in the robe of Primavera. I can live on the doves flying (he says) in cohorts from the underside of the faded gilt of the balcony of Saint Mark’s cathedral and the long corridors of the Pitti Palace. I can gorge myself on Rome and the naked Bacchus and the face like a blasted lightning-blasted white birch that is some sort of Fury. […] And I can live on nothing."
"I could tell you that these things were trails to be followed, that it didn’t matter where they led, or even that the one thing that did matter was that they didn’t lead anywhere, or at least not in some predetermined direction. I could say they were like an outline for something. It’s up to you to go on with them or to go off on a tangent; and it’s up to me to pursue them or give them a different configuration. And then, we—you or I—could see what could be done with these fragments."
— Michel Foucault, from a lecture at the Collège de France, 7 January 1976, in Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (via proustitute)
"Our footsteps run, and I don’t want them to end. I want to run and laugh and feel like this forever. I want to avoid any awkward moment when the realness of reality sticks its fork into our flesh, leaving us standing there, together. I want to stay here, in this moment, and never go to other places, where we don’t know what to say or what to do."
"Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything."
"It’s funny, you work so hard, you do everything you can to get away from a place, and when you finally get your chance to leave, you find a reason to stay."
"‘The way to do it,’ he said, ‘is to take a shoebox and make a slit at the top; then whenever you have an idea jot it down and slip the piece of paper into the shoebox. After a while, you open the box, put all these sentences in order and you have a draft’ … I knew that if I stayed home from work to put the draft together, I would end up cleaning the cooker or doing some other major piece of housework, so I arranged to spend the day at a friend’s house … I had no distractions or excuses. I opened the shoebox, and by six or seven that evening, just as he’d said, I had the draft of a pamphlet."
"I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention. For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks-accidentally-and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you’re alive."
— Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors (via fallere)
