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“She was the first person to show me that the meaning of true joy is the resolve to dance—and that dance is the best way to express unfathomable sadness without a single word.”

~ Jennifer Neal, ‘Notes on Her Colour”

#quotes #Jennifer Neal #Notes on Her Colour #dancing #improv #being #the doughnut

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“When was it that I became a voyeur in their midst? I was the perfect witness, an unsuspected anthropologist disguised within the body of a young girl, surrounded by other young girls who were part of the family. Yet I was a cuckoo in the nest, an imposter who listened and observed, hoarding and collecting information.”

~ Emily Bitto, “The Strays”

#beginnings #the imposter feeling #quotes #belonging #Emily Bitto #The Strays

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“But that summer in the Trentham house I could see a different future, one that I felt I might belong in. I felt that I was no longer on the periphery of a life I imagined to exist somewhere out of reach, but that I had broken out of some brittle carapace and was unfurling in the sunlight. Around Evan and the other artists I was learning the habit of attention, of noticing the world in all its ravishing detail and complexity. The habit of being amazed. They told stories, looking at objects and people until they shook them clean of the dust of everyday and made them myth. On warm evenings we trailed around the garden after Helena, on her wanders with her five o'clock gin and tonic. She pointed out plants to us, teaching us their botanical names. Ugo, Jerome and Maria went to Broken Hill and out into the desert, and came back with sketches dominated by skies, trees, windmills and water tanks; by space and wind. They brought back watercolours drenched in reds and ochres. We all went camping to Timboon. We caught fish, sat around the campfire late into the night. We went night-swimming. The cool prickle of fear and exhilaration in the deep black water.”

~ Emily Bitto, “The Strays”

#The Strays #Emily Bitto #quotes #identity #belonging #Australian Literature #being an artist

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“The education provided by society operates in two directions at once. It suppresses every noncomformist tendency through penalties of withdrawal of support and simultaneously imbues the individual with values that force him to overcome and discard spontaneous desires. These conditions cause the majority of adults today to live behind a mask, a mask of personality that the individual tries to present to others and to himself. Every aspiration and spontaneous desire is subjected to stringent internal criticism lest they reveal the individual's organic nature. Such aspirations and desires arouse anxiety and remorse and the individual seeks to suppress the urge to realize them. The only compensation that makes life durable despite these sacrifices is the satisfaction derived from society's recognition of the individual who achieves its definition of success. The need for constant support by one's fellows is so great that most people spend the larger part of their lives fortifying their masks. Repeated success is essential to encourage the individual to persist in this masquerade.”

Moshe Feldenkrais, “Awareness Through Movement”

#quotes #movement #the mask #performance #identity #belonging #habitus #Moshe Feldenkrais #feldenkrais

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“I remember that day, after it all fell apart, when Eva came to me through the misty garden so that her red coat bled into view from white to pale rose to scarlet, the pride I felt. That I was the one she turned to. That I could give her what he own family could not. All those years as part of the Trenchan lives. Feeling loved, but never needed, never family. I am an only child; it is my lot to be envious, even grasping, to long for the bonds that tie sisters together, the fearless, unthinking acceptance that we are social creatures, pack animals, that there is never, truly, the threat of being alone.”

The Strays, Emily Bitto

#quotes #The Strays #Emily Bitto #making sense of the distinction between love and need #isolation #desire #identity #belonging

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“We don't walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.”

Anne Enright, “The Wren, The Wren”

#quotes #anne enright #phenomenology #language #translation

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Wanderer

by Antonio Machado

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road– Only wakes upon the sea.

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“It was by accident that I glimpsed myself in the mirror without trying to. I didn't seek out the image I knew of myself. I had lost the memory of my face. I saw it there for the first time. I knew in that moment that I existed.”

~ Marguerite Duras, The Easy Life (translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan)

I find it hard to believe that Duras wrote The Easy Life in 1940. I feel like she’s reaching out to me from that time, to tell me that living has that effect on a person, that the images I’ve created for myself aren’t the fantasies of a flawed or faulty or psychologically maladapted pharmacologically altered being - they’re just what happens. You don’t need to fear the image.

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“I felt myself slowly falling asleep. My fatigue was mine, mine alone, I couldn't share it with anyone, I didn't want anyone near me. I had drawn it close to my body while swimming and now it enveloped me, as secure, as entangled, as sleep. It was not deceptive, my fatigue; it was like the sun above my head, full and round. I no longer wanted to move at all, and yet at the same time I wanted to leave and never see them again. Not because they had left me alone or because I was bored, but because I wanted proof that I was capable of doing it, I wanted the memory that I had been capable of doing it. It was because my body was so heavy with fatigue that my thoughts went off so freely, so light.

I thought about the sea, unknown to me.”

~ Marguerite Duras, The Easy Life (translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan)

#Marguerite Duras #The Easy Life #quotes #oh these words #identity #family systems #complexity

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“We had counted on time to impose order on the affairs of the house. Time had passed. Chaos had won out even so. It was now a chaos of souls, of blood. We could no longer heal, we no longer wanted to. We no longer knew how to want to be free, we were dreamers, degenerates, people who dream of happiness, a true happiness that will overwhelm it all… We still pleased ourselves, and we desired nothing else in the end except to continue to believe that we were made for an impossible life.”

~ Marguerite Duras, The Easy Life (translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan)

#chaos #complexity #time #anxiety #family systems #CPTSD

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“Beyond assertions of innocence and impotence, beyond passive-aggressive perseveration on what you didn't like… lies an ocean, the ocean of what you do like, what you do want, what you are able to ask for, what you need help in asking for, what you don't know you want until you try it, what you thought you wanted but it turns out you don't (or at least not tonight), and so on. We must learn to swim in this ocean if we don't want to simmer endlessly in resentment, frustration, and complaint. (I say this as someone who has done plenty of such simmering.) If and when someone's desires reveal themselves to be incompatible with ours, of course they can seem repulsive or wrongheaded. But repeatedly placing ourselves in the position of rejecting or passing judgment on them can become its own form of exercising shame and power, not to mention of insulating ourselves from the risks that come with naming our own desires, or even admitting that we desire. And there really are risks, insofar as owning our lust, kinks, vulnerabilities, and choices means opening them up to being judged by others - as laden with false consciousness, politically imper-fect, unshared or unwelcome, asking for it, self-destructive, weird, vanilla, “TMI”, perhaps even as prosecutable.”

~ Maggie Nelson, On Freedom (p. 85)

#quotes #Maggie Nelson #individuation #sex #desire #freedom #shame #power #self #identity

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“There is something unbreachable about a lie told with total conviction. Even when you brandish the proof, if the liar holds their nerve, your righteous outrage falters. You have been trained to be reasonable and to see both sides. You scurry from one side to the other till you have no idea where you are. The liar remains absolutely still. You become a blur and they are terribly clear. Their refusal of fact and evidence and reason is dazzling. You take your anger back inside yourself but no longer trust it. Are you mad?”

- Lavinia Greenlaw, Some Questions Without Answers

#Lavinia Greenlaw #quotes #anger #fear #c-ptsd #the gaslight feeling

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“Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”

~ David Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion & Desire (p. 378)

#David Graeber #agency #freedom #anthropology #identity

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“My hope is that if women aren't perceived as hysterical or given the message that it is unseemly and 'unfeminine' for them to be assertive and show rage, they will be more able to question words and action that cast doubt on the legitimacy of their emotions.”

~ Pragya Agarwal, Hysterical

Thank you, Pragya, your hope is precisely what I needed to hear today.

#quotes #emotions #gender #Cartesian dualism #identity #authenticity #Pragya Agarwal

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"The shared secret for biology, it seemed to me, was reaching down to the level of cells and their molecular principles, while retaining perspective on the whole system, the whole body. The inner feeling evoked in me by the prospect of extending this simple cellular idea to the mysteries ofnthe mind- of awareness, of emotions, of the stirring of feeling by language- was a pure and pressured delight, like Toni Morrison's "rogue anticipation with certainty," that universal human state of restless joy upon suddenly seeing a path forward.

In talking with friends in our shared dormitory (fellow students who were all, innexplicably, theoretical physicists) over meals, I discovered this was a feeling shared by cosmologists probing phenomena playing out over astromnomicad scales of space and time. They too began by considering the smllest and most elemental forms of matter, together with the fumdamental forces guiding interactions over tiny distances. The resuly was a process both celestial and personal. The feeling was of synthesis and analysis, together."

- Connections, Karl Deisseroth

#quotes #being #identity #anthropology #connections #that freaky feeling #moving forward #emic + etic #scale + specificity #kinship #Karl Deisseroth

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"It is strange now to think that, although my potential might be my own, its realisation was owed very much to Paul. First, because he declared that I had any, and second, because in that first meeting he showed me, through conversation, what using it might look like."

Diana Reid, Love & Virtue

#quotes #being #authenticity #attachment #self identity

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Giulia Rosa