Sublime

Both through her fiction and in her diaries Butler demonstrated that no one was a nobody. To be a person in whatever place or time had value. Self-doubting, self-made, self-helped, the city-state’s prophet suffered and thrived on things found in the world and mind. Both gave her pain. Both gave her art. So be it. See to it. She found a way.

In short, I benefited from that basic inequality between men, whose erotic potential diminishes very slowly as they age, and women, for whom the collapse comes with shocking brutality from one year, or even one month, to the next.

Modern memoir posits that the shaped presentation of one’s own life is of value to the disinterested reader only if it dramatizes and reflects sufficiently on the experience of “becoming”: undertakes to trace the internal movement away from the murk of being told who you are by the accident of circumstance toward the clarity that identifies

And, like many modern people—modern women, especially—I had catapulted out of my context…The successes [of the writers] gave me hope, of course, yet it was the desperate bits I liked best. I was looking for directions, gathering clues.

During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a

When Foucault imagined life as a work of art he imagined an art object. Arendt, in contrast, imagined life as a narrative, authored by the social collectivity rather than by the lone individual.

But we might go out together and see a riot grrrl punk band whose drummer she’d been texting; and then I, Ministry operative, would have to supervise them both at dinner (Margaret had a mania for customisable pizzas with nonsense toppings); then Margaret might see that the drummer and I were one barbed sentence away from a fight about politics

Nettie and he—a sort of perseverance, a persistent understanding. Where would Nettie have found strength for the unremitting concessions of daily life? She was precipitated from delight to lamentation without logical sequence, as though life were too short; she must cram everything in and perhaps sort it out later.

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.