Home > Work > Euphoria
21 " The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s. "
― Lily King , Euphoria
22 " I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them. "
23 " I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake. "
24 " When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis? "
25 " I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. "
26 " Both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn’t want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them. "
27 " Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model. "
28 " The story you think you know is never the real one. "
29 " It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone. "
30 " Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? "
31 " What’s the point of all this? Of all what? she asked. Of all this life. "
32 " I do know I can lie awake all night and it feels as if someone is cutting out my stomach the pain of having lost her is so awful. And I am angry that I was made to choose, that both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn’t want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them. It was unfair, the way I had to decide one way or another in Marseille. Perhaps I made the conventional choice, the easy way for my work, my reputation, and of course for a child. A child that does not come. "
33 " But I don't trust a crowds - hundreds of people together without cognition and only the basest impulses: food, drink, sex. Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain, find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is exactly my point. "
34 " Personality depends on context, just like culture. Certain people bring out certain traits in each other [...] You don't always see how much other people are shaping you. "
35 " Funny how when you have a purpose the misery goes and hides. "
36 " I could not take my eyes off her. It was as if she were performing some trick, some sort of unfolding. There was something raw and exposed about her, as if many things had already happened between us, as if time had leapt ahead and we were already lovers. "
37 " Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination. —Ruth Benedict "
38 " Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our "progress", so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? "
39 " You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing. "
40 " For long stretches of time it felt like we were crawling around each other's brain. "