Sublime

“It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others.”

When someone you love suffers, you’ve failed to protect them. This may

“an exhaustive list of purported ailments—[is] carried around by a neurotic patient, often accompanied by extensive documentation of each bowel movement or sip of water.”

As the poet and essayist Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal in 1851, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.

That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

Apart from whatever is true about Chung Kuo as an item of ideological merchandise (and the Chinese are not wrong in finding the film condescending), Antonioni’s images simply mean more than any images the Chinese release of themselves. The Chinese don’t want photographs to mean very much or to be very interesting. They do not want to see the world

The medical uncertainty compounds patients’ own uncertainty.