Notes

❝ It is likely … that human society cannot exist without some source of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.
— Richard Weaver, Ideas have Consequences
❝ I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.
— Henry Rollins
❝ A witch is, actually, a successful (in the sense of surviving) deviant. You have a cultural, ideological, social, what-not pattern which is, for that society in question, normal (and, importantly, this is understood as a synonym for natural). Most people survive because they conform to these patterns, because they behave normally. […] But then suddenly you get a deviant which survives, and since it does not draw its support from the normal pattern, […] that deviant is understood as drawing its support from “unknown,” “supernatural” sources. […] If we cannot survive without our order, how can she [the witch] survive in solitude? Hers must be indeed a very powerful order to exist so independently, without all the inter cooperation and individual compromise which we have to go through to survive. And if it is so powerful, then it could destroy us. We must try to destroy it first.
— Maya Deren, “From the Notebook of Maya Deren”, c.October 1947, vol. 14: pages 21–45
❝ The longing to touch / be touched. I feel gratitude when I touch someone— as well as affection, etc. The person has allowed me proof that I have a body— and that there are bodies in the world.
— Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks
❝ Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.
— Fernando Pessoa
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whist she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.
— John Berger in Ways of Seeing

❝ What is now mythology, was once explanation.
— Garry Shaw, in his book “The Egyptian Myths: a guide to the ancient gods and legends”
I am torn in two / but I will conquer myself. / I will dig up the pride. / I will take scissors and cut out the beggar. / I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken / pieces of God in me. / I will conquer them all and build a whole nation of God / in me — but united, / build a new soul, / dress it with skin / and then put on my shirt / and sing an anthem, / a song of myself.
— Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems: “The Civil War,”

One does not find solitude, one creates it. Solitude is created alone. I have created it. Because I decided that here was where I should be alone, that I would be alone to write books. It happened this way. I was alone in this house. I shut myself in—of course, I was afraid. And then I began to love it. This house became the house of writing. My books come from this house. From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It has taken me twenty years to write what I just said.
— Marguerite Duras, Writing