sari

“So thinking is prior to language. What language contributes is to firm up certain particular ways of seeing the world and give fixity to them. This has its good side, and its bad. It aids consistency of reference over time and space. But it can also exert a restrictive force on what and how we think. It represents a more fixed version of the world... See more

“Emotion is inseparable from the body in which it is felt, and emotion is also the basis for our engagement with the world.”

“By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place ... See more

“Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.”

“The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”

I met some of my heroes and some of them sucked; I attended events that were hollow and demented but looked fun online; I eventually realized the best parts of my life weren’t exclusive whatsoever but run-of-the-mill: a result not of being elevated above my peers (on a stage, say) but thrust among them (in the crowd). In time I came to see these po... See more

From a practical distance, achieving public success scanned to me as belonging, which is ironic, because what I’m talking about is actually separation: an elevation of my own standing above the crowd. This must be one of the most common misapprehensions about fame, while somehow also being the most cliché.