Previous weeks' quotations

2008

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Previous weeks' quotations 1999

Previous weeks' quotations 2000

Previous weeks' quotations 2001

Previous weeks' quotations 2002

Previous weeks' quotations 2003

Previous weeks' quotations 2004

Previous weeks' quotations 2005

Previous weeks' quotations 2006

Previous weeks' quotations 2007

Jan 2008

2^nd January

[N]o doubt about it, ideas about what women can do, and do well, have changed. And what women mind has changed. Male behaviour, from the caddish to the outright violent, that until recently was accepted without demurral is seen today as outrageous by many women who not so long ago were putting up with it themselves and who would still protest indignantly if someone described them as feminists.

Susan Sontag, 'A Photograph is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?' (1999), in Where the Stress Falls: essays (2003)

9^th January

But let her get him well started on that perfectly safe, and at the same time perfectly fascinating theme of his own ego, and there will be no silence. Amazing strength, though.

G B Stern, 'Man - Without Prejudice (Rough Notes), in Man, Proud Man, edited by Mabel Ulrich (1932)

16^th January

Obviously we're all trying to fix ourselves because change at the social level is stalled, precisely because the female condition is so tangled and contradictory at the moment: social freedom has expanded while actual independence is as constrained as ever.

Laura Kipnis, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability (2007)

23^rd January

[H]e seems, as a historian, to be happy in his own skin. That is to say, he loves making tentative suggestions, he derives a proper enjoyment from getting things right, but he is not over-anxious to prove what can't be proved.

Bard times: James Fenton on rows over Rowse , Guardian Review, 19 Jan 2008

30^th January

Emily pushed her hair behind her ears. 'But I'm not sure, Cee, that there is a correct way for people to oppose the system. All these people were produced by the system, all have found their own needs and ways of resisting or opposing it. I agree that some of those ways are extremely undesirable. But who has the right answer, if there is one?'

L Timmel Duchamp, Blood in the Fruit (2008)

Feb 2008

6^th February

The contemporary work I praised (and used as a platform to relaunch my ideas about art-making and consciousness) didn't detract from the glories of what I admired far more. Enjoying the impertinent energy and wit of a species of performance called Happenings did not make me care less about Aristotle and Shakespeare. I was--I am--for a pluralistic, polymorphous culture.

Susan Sontag, 'Thirty Years Later...' (1995), in Where the Stress Falls: essays (2003)

Opticians, apparently, are not a litigious class, but they must often have been sorely tempted to protest. In film after film the suggestion has been made that a pair of spectacles will cut down any heroine's love-life. Again and again a plain girl has blossomed into a tearing beauty by the simple device of taking off her glasses. She simply smashes the nasty things, and steps out towards romance without a blink; better-dressed, clearer-skinned, head held high, and sight totally unaffected.

C A Lejeune. 'Come Now, Voyager' (Review of Now, Voyager), 1943, in Chestnuts in her Lap, 1936-1947 (1948)

20^th February

She is the same in everything; if the perfect apartment is finally found for her, she laments that there isn't a good butcher nearby. She has the capacity for making everyone or at least me feel helplessly at fault, apologetic, as though one were the personal ruler of these arbitrary external conditions.

Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, 14 Jun 1958, in Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 , edited by Carol Brightman (1996)

27^th February

[T]he daughter of the Bulgarian Emperor Terteri, till lately Milutin's wife.... was to be filed for reference, to be brought out or forgotten as political expediency was served.... [S]he proved to what a limited degree it is possible, without falling into the most savage irony, to describe women as the protected sex.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942)

Mar 2008

5^th March

Contemporary art often plays to the part of us that is very uncomfortable with not being sure, that cannot maintain a state of 'don't know'. The over-prioritising of meaning gets in the way of just experiencing the art in a more sensual way. Judging quality purely from an intuitive emotional response needs more confidence and experience than just working it out like a crossword clue.

Grayson Perry, answering the question 'Are we now post-postmodern?' 50 arts secrets revealed - Art The Observer, 2 Mar 2008

[There was no quotation for 12 March]

19^th March

The whole point of his walks was this smashing through in big boots past NO ENTRY notices and anti-trespasser signs. And it took me quite a long time before I realised that when Sticking plunged straight across the corner of Mr Butts's orchard, disturbing the chickens, what he was saying was "the land is for the people", as if in some way he was more people than old Mr Butts.

Stephen Potter, Supermanship (1958)

26^th March

Conversation turns upon Lady B. and everyone says she is really very kind-hearted, and follows this up by anecdotes illustrating all her less attractive qualities.... Fell much more at home after this, and conscious of new bond of union cementing entire party. Sidelight thus thrown upon human nature regrettable, but not to be denied.

E M Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930)

Apr 2008

2^nd April

When men decide that a woman has character and will be all right, they usually also decide that there is no need to worry about her feelings.

Stella Gibbons, Here Be Dragons (1956)

9^th April

Q Does everyone have a novel in them?
ALK: [A L Kennedy] They have all kinds of things in them - liver, spleen, perhaps recklessly inserted lightbulbs. Whether you want any of those things to be removed and then sold to strangers is the question.

50 arts secrets revealed The Observer, 2 Mar 2008

16^th April

I had found myself attending more plays than I had done for a very long time. Most of them were rigorously modern dramas requiring all the actors to say 'cunt' repeatedly, this being considered the worst swearword possible and therefore cast-iron proof that the author was young, rebellious and hadn't told his parents what time he'd be back that evening.

Lauren Henderson, The Strawberry Tattoo (1999)

23^rd April

Too many folks might convert to feminist thought if they knew firsthand the powerful and passionate positive transformation it would create in every area of their sexual lives. It is better for patriarchy to try and make us believe that the only real sex available to feminist women who like men must be negotiated using the same old patriarchal modes of seduction that are perpetually unsatisfying to all women.

bell hooks, 'Talking sex: beyond the patriarchal phallic imaginary' in Outlaw Culture: resisting representations (1994)

30^th April

[B]eing fulfilled by a man, through him, requires her to reserve a space for him to inhabit, given content to, illustrate.

The devaluation and demystification of man does not mean that this empty space is now at woman's disposal, ready to be newly furnished, a beckoning new territory. No -- it is bare and uncultivated, without models or concepts, without images or myths.

Christina Thürmer-Rohr, Vagabonding: Feminist Thinking Cut Loose (1987/1991)

May 2008

7^th May

Anyhow most of us agreed that he couldn't possibly say he was sent down for the thing he was sent down for, because however frank the self-revelation, no-one could ever possibly put that particular thing in a book, discreditable as it was in a way so uniquely combining the unpleasant and the uninteresting.

Stephen Potter, Supermanship (1958)

14^th May

But suppose revolutions were merely smashes-up that hadn't very much to do with real progress either way, and that the new age dawned anywhere where people could get free enough to work out new ideas.

H G Wells, Christina Alberta's Father (1925)

[No quotations for 21 and 28 May]

Jun 2008

4^th June

It is well known, of course, that a sufficiently intense commitment to navel-gazing can result in something universal.

Stephen Poole, review of Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown by Lorna Martin, in Guardian Weekend Review, 31 May 2008

11^th June

It is not beauty nor strength nor goodness that hearts go to so much as attention. To know that another human being thinks of us, esteems us above all our secret estimates, has a steadfast and consuming need of us, is the supreme reassurance of life.

H G Wells, Joan and Peter: The story of an education (1918)

[No quotation for 18 June]

25^th June

My childhood had no narrative: it was all just a combination of air and no air: waiting for life to happen, the body to get big, the mind to grow fearless. There were no stories, no ideas, not really, not yet.

Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994)

Ju1 2008

Aug 2008

Sep 2008

Oct 2008

Nov 2008

Dec 2008