August 2011
9 posts
“To the degree that we live generously and discreetly, exhibiting grace under pressure, our appearance and our acts gradually assume virtual royal power. As we become noble, fully realising the spark of creative goodness God has endowed us with - the shining orara bird of thought and inspiration - we find the confidence to cope with all kinds of situations. This is ashe. This is character. This is mystic coolness. All one. Paradise is regained, for Yoruba art returns the idea of heaven to mankind wherever the ancient ideal attitudes are genuinely manifested.”
—from ‘Black Saints Go Marching In: Yoruba Art and Culture in the Americas’ in Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy by Robert Farris Thompson, 1983
“I often think about bachelors. A life of pure decision, of thoughtful calculations, of every inclination honored. They go about on their own, nicely accompanied in their singularity by the companion of possibility. For cannot any man, young or old, rich or poor, turn a few corners and bump into marriage?”
—Elizabeth Hardwick | quoted in Lisa Levy’s ‘An Original Adventure’, The Believer
“…insist upon your right to go off on a tangent. Your right to put the spanner in the works. Your right to refuse to be labelled and to insist on your right to behave like anything other than what anyone expects. Your right to simply say no for the pleasure of it. To insist on your right to confound all who insist on regimenting human impulses according to theories psychological, religious, historical, philosophical, political, etc. … Insist upon your right to insist upon your right to insist on the importance, the great importance of whim.”
—Dambudzo Marechera | The House of Hunger
