RT

When you hand a piece of creative work to a research method designed to minimise risk, you will always get a risk-minimised output. Edges get sanded off, provocation becomes palatable, art direction becomes obvious. More often than not the result is work that offends no one, moves no one, and is forgotten by everyone, but somehow it tests well...... See more

I want something quieter and harder to counterfeit: the intensity of attention that notices the quiver of a wrist when reaching for a glass; the presence that enlarges an ordinary afternoon; the appetite that doesn’t require catastrophe to be vivid. I want Romanticism stripped of its operatic melodrama, no consumptive poets dying by candlelight,... See more

We’ve traded the theatre of passion for the theatre of avoidance, as though emotional minimalism were the only responsible way to survive modern life. A world that considers yearning immature and indifference sophisticated leaves us fluent in strategy yet illiterate in wonder.

I distrust a culture that treats longing itself as a pathology.

I’d rather be indicted for the crime of feeling too much than acquitted for indifference.

I’ll invest in the love between us, even when there’s no guarantee of permanence. That’s the tax of living. That’s the cost for feeling any sort of aliveness or tenderness. There’s no insurance on your experience. No way to backstop the loss.

Presence is not a feature. It is a choice made moment by moment by someone who could leave but chooses to stay.