We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be.

Richard Avedon, in Emma Forrest’s: “Your Voice In My Head: A Memoir” (Other Press, May 3, 2011) 

The great artists don’t even bother to put it down on paper: they live with it silently, they become it.

Everyone has their own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is. If you can get it down on paper, in words, notes, or color, so much the better. The great artists don’t even bother to put it down on paper: they live with it silently, they become it.

— Henry Miller, Stand Still Like The Hummingbird (New Directions, June 17, 1962) (via Alive on All Channels)

so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken—I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Mariner Books, January 1, 1950) (via Alive on All Channels)

the end of each lexical entry –a blank space

She had been working on the illustration plans for a few months, now; each lexical entry would be surrounded on the page by sketches, paintings, loose strokes of wild landscape or precise, inky detail, depending on the word, and at the end of each lexical entry – a blank space,

to fill in one’s own definition.

The words could be homonyms, like bolt, buckle, entrance, fair, hatch, mine, squash. Or just beautiful, unusual words. Cherish or cascade. Elixir. Susurrus. Petrichor.

— Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)

I found this thought surprisingly moving

Other Things I Know:
She inhales around thirteen pints of air a day and exhales billions and billions of molecules of oxygen in a moment. There is a theory that every person will have a sliver of
every other person that has ever lived just quietly pass on through them at some time or another. I find this thought surprisingly moving.

— Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)