I will show that there is no speech without a response, even if speech meets only with silence…
—Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (via proustitute)
There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world.
—William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (via thegirlandherbooks)
(via booklover)
love’s function is to fabricate unknownness
—e. e. cummings, from 100 Selected Poems (via proustitute)
Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
—Ezra Pound (via wordpainting)
(via booklover)
I wish that I had spoken only of it all.
—Gertrude Stein, from “Stanzas in Meditation” (via proustitute)
People come through the gateway, people in streams and clusters, in mass assemblies. No one seems to be alone. This is a place to enter in crowds, seek company and talk. Everyone is talking. I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language.
—Don Delillo. [There are many things that need to be said about The Names. This will have to do for now.] (via allbecause)
There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom.
—Annie Dillard, from Holy the Firm (via petitchou)
What is this desire that nothing can change or deflect when everything changes? The lack of forgetting is the same thing as the lack in being, since being is nothing other than forgetting. The love of truth is the love of this weakness whose veil we have lifted, it’s the love of what truth hides…
—Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII, trans. Russell Grigg (via proustitute)
