3
" Will you think about the kissing?” he asks, and I laugh again and mimic his shrug. If only he knew how much I think about the kissing. “Will you reconsider hand-holding?” he asks, instead of answering, I move my arm so it’s next to his, so we are lined up, seam to seam. He reaches out his pinky finger and links it around mine and a warm, delicious chill makes its way up my arm. We stay that way for a minute, in a pinky swear, which feels like the smallest of promises. And then I grab his whole hand and link his fingers in mine. A slightly bigger promise. Or maybe a demand: Please be part of my tribe. It’s pretty simple, really. For once, things are not complicated. Right now, right here, it’s just us, together, like this. Palm to palm. The most honest of gestures. One of the ways through. Maybe the best one. "
― Julie Buxbaum , What to Say Next
6
" It's a bit like sympathetic magic in a way: the usual Western presumption that 'primitive' rituals mimic what they desire to achieve--that phallic objects might be believed to increase male potency and playacting rainfall might somehow bring it about. I am suspicious of such obvious connections and I suspect that the connections among things, people, and processes can be equally irrational. I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song. "
― David Byrne , Bicycle Diaries
8
" I myself beheld the King Charge at the head of all his Table Round, And all his legions crying Christ and him, And break them; and I saw him, after, stand High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume Red as the rising sun with heathen blood, And seeing me, with a great voice he cried, " They are broken, they are broken!" for the King, However mild he seems at home, nor cares For triumph in our mimic wars, the jousts— For if his own knight cast him down, he laughs Saying, his knights are better men than he— Yet in this heathen war the fire of God Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives No greater leader. "
16
" I shou'd not myself have thought [Cato] worth so much notice as I have here taken of him; but that the Men are weak enough in general, to suffer their sense to be led away captive, by such half-thinking retailers of sentences. Among whom, This in particular, was he worth the pains, might be easily proved to have been often grossly in the wrong in other matters as well as in the present case; and therefore, when he happens to be in the right, the merit of it is more to be imputed to blind chance than to his wisdom: Since the greatest fools, when active, may blunder into the right sometimes: And great talkers among many absurdities, must here and there drop a good saying, when they least design it. Of this stamp, are the generality of evidence brought against us. Men avers'd to the labour of thinking; who found reason a drudgery (...); who have gain'd all their reputation by a pretty gimness of expressions, which wou'd no more bear examination than their heads, their hearts, or their faces; and who (to mimic this sage) wou'd rather see common-sense in confusion, than a word misplaced in one of their sentences. Yet these are sages among the Men, and their sentences are so many divine oracles; whereas perhaps, had we lived in their own times, to have heard the many more foolish things they said than sensible ones, we shou'd have found them as oafish as the dupes who revere them. And tho' perhaps we might have been more surprized to hear such dotards talk sometimes rationally, than we now are, to read their sayings; we shou'd have had reason still to think them more fit to extort our admiration than deserve it. Care has been taken to hand down to us the best of their sentences, many of which nevertheless are weak enough: But had the same care been taken to register all their absurdities, how great a share of their present applause wou'd they have lost! "
― Sophia Fermor , Woman Not Inferior to Man
17
" Wetikos can psychopathically (and thus toxically) mimic the human personality perfectly. If it serves their agenda, they can be convincing beyond belief, making themselves out to be normal, caring, politically correct human beings. They can endlessly talking about taking responsibility, but they never genuinely face up to and become accountable for their actions. They are unable to genuinely mourn, being only concerned with themselves. They will feign grief, however, just as they will try to appear compassionate, if it is politically expedient to do so and, hence, to their advance, they are master manipulators. "
18
" As a special branch of general philosophy, pathogenesis had never been explored. In my opinion it had never been approached in a strictly scientific fashion--that is to say, objectively, amorally, intellectually.
All those who have written on the subject are filled with prejudice. Before searching out and examining the mechanism of causes of disease, they treat of 'disease as such', condemn it as an exceptional and harmful condition, and start out by detailing the thousand and one ways of combating it, disturbing it, destroying it; they define health, for this purpose, as a 'normal' condition that is absolute and immutable.
Diseases ARE. We do not make or unmake them at will. We are not their masters. They make us, they form us. They may even have created us. They belong to this state of activity which we call life. They may be its main activity. They are one of the many manifestations of universal matter. They may be the principal manifestation of that matter which we will never be able to study except through the phenomena of relationships and analogies. Diseases are a transitory, intermediary, future state of health. It may be that they are health itself.
Coming to a diagnosis is, in a way, casting a physiological horoscope.
What convention calls health is, after all, no more than this or that passing aspect of a morbid condition, frozen into an abstraction, a special case already experienced, recognized, defined, finite, extracted and generalized for everybody's use. Just as a word only finds its way into the Dictionary Of The French Academy when it is well worn stripped of the freshness of its popular origin or of the elegance of its poetic value, often more than fifty years after its creation (the last edition of the learned Dictionary is dated 1878), just as the definition given preserves a word, embalms it in its decrepitude, but in a pose which is noble, hypocritical and arbitrary--a pose it never assumed in the days of its vogue, while it was still topical, living and meaningful--so it is that health, recognized as a public Good, is only the sad mimic of some illness which has grown unfashionable, ridiculous and static, a solemnly doddering phenomenon which manages somehow to stand on its feet between the helping hands of its admirers, smiling at them with its false teeth. A commonplace, a physiological cliche, it is a dead thing. And it may be that health is death itself.
Epidemics, and even more diseases of the will or collective neuroses, mark off the different epochs of human evolution, just as tellurian cataclysms mark the history of our planet. "
― Blaise Cendrars , Moravagine
