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The distinction between these two types of character, one archaic and one modern, touches on the distinction between characters portrayed entirely through their outward lives and characters who have their own inner livse. These differences are essential, and mysterious, and can really only mean two things: Either people in earlier eras were radically different from modern people, in other words they did not actually have an inner life in our understanding of the term, an autonomous self reflecting on itself. Or else only the depictions are different, and thus the conceptions of what is essential and inessential to a person. The question is whether these two possibilities aren’t, in the final analysis, the same.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Fate”, in The Land of the Cyclops, translated by Martin Aitken

[T]here are certain people, not many, who enter one’s life with the power to make those moments happen. Maybe that’s what falling in love means—the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.

Stuart Dybek, “Paper Lantern”

An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”, in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence

What do we call this desire
to be desired? The milkweed’s impenitent bow
to the monarch or starlight. The heart’s timpani

at a sundress, a thigh,
a braided anklet. A kind word escaping the cocktail
glass. An olive in brine. Name it beauty

and chase will become
our watchword. Call it love and the sun will kneel.
Say happiness and “Do I deserve this?”

follows, rapturous, like a sparrow
pecking the ground. Instead of wisdom, why not
wish for the owl’s heart

at night, seeing in the dark
more than a meal, but a place to sing. Don’t imagine
a dirge for the eaten. Conjure

an exhale instead:
the hoot of being alive. Name it
                                                        whatever you like.

Steven Leyva, “Limerence”

I think of opacity as, not necessarily armour, but as an assurance of a fuller self—that you can traverse the world without having to constantly pick up your entrails.

Firelei Báez, note on Adjusting the Moon (The right to non-imperative clarities): Waxing, Vancouver Art Gallery

A formal proof of this theorem is given in Table III. Like all formal proofs, it is excessively tedious, and it would be fairly easy to introduce notational conventions which would significantly shorten it. An even more powerful method of reducing the tedium of formal proofs is to derive general rules for proof construction out of the simple rules accepted as postulates. These general rules would be shown to be valid by demonstrating how every theorem proved with their assistance could equally well (if more tediously) have been proven without. Once a powerful set of supplementary rules has been developed, a “formal proof” reduces to little more than an informal indication of how a formal proof could be constructed.

C. A. R. Hoare, “An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming”

Try, start here, try bringing a pot of coffee out into the sun in despite of the hot weather, and sit at your chair and table ready for all possible assimilations. Include with the coffee something slightly intensely sweet: not slightly sweet but slightly intensely, since all intensities only need to be slight at this point. Sit and drink the coffee and eat the chocolate, and here is the thing: stop making the mistake of trying to show other people that furthermost corner of yourself, it is good for one thing only, walk calmly over and ask them for it back. Remember, for instance, that telling people you are reading Tolkien late at night fatally alters the chemical composition of doing this. Also, stop celebrating. Or, qualifying that a little, remember that celebrating can also be very privately sitting drinking your coffee on a sunny morning, watching people go past in the street and reading a book you may not finish. Yes you have been blessed and baffled with success lately, and also god yes there is the ferocity of having a new lover, but what about behaving as if none of these things were relevant to your own strict project? Sometimes accuracy must take the place of expansiveness.

Rosalind Brown, “Discourse to Self”

Someone said, at first
we want romance, then for life
to be bearable,
at last, undestandable.
I am frightened, now
that the trees look like question
marks, how the moon makes
strange noise but it’s daytime.
Bells have begun to notice me.

Victoria Chang, “Passing”, in The Trees Witness Everything

I must speak about what I regard as the mistaken belief that artists who fail to respond to their social, economic, or political circumstances are turning their backs on the world. So far as I am concerned, no artist who has wholeheartedly embraced an artistic tradition and found something personal within that tradition can be condemned to irrelevance. The artist who has struggled with authority and freedom has confronted one of the most basic human predicaments.

Jed Perl, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts