the-wind-will-carry-us:

“Remove everything unnecessary. Resist the onslaught of secondary ideas that come with your primary one. Don’t adulterate. The most effective way of refining your work is to keep it short and simple. ‘I didn’t really do anything,’ explained Michelangelo when asked how he created David. ‘The statue already existed in the block of stone. All I did was remove everything unnecessary.’ Rumi advises us not to talk too much, to use the fewest words possible. Consider this idea when telling your stories, when making films, when selecting images, when living life.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

coocoolah:

“I have never been able to understand people with consistent lives – people who, for example, grow up in a liberal Catholic household and stay that way; or who in junior high school are already laying down a record on which to run for president one day. Imagine having no discarded personalities, no vestigial selves, no visible ruptures with yourself, no gulf of self-forgetfulness, nothing that requires explanation, no alien version of yourself that requires humor and accommodation. What kind of life is that?”

— Michael Warner, “Tongues Untied” in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (216)

codegoth:

for all intents and purposes

• i am NOT real
• i do NOT have a legal name
• i do NOT have a “face”
• Do Not Think About Me
• I Am Not A Concept

dare-i-say-asexual:

The stories of women in my family who were forced into lives they didn’t want and didn’t utilize their passions breaks my heart. My grandma wanted to be a journalist and write about the injustices she saw inflicted on disabled ppl while she was volunteering at a state run institution as a teen. Her father decided that she was “too fat and stupid” for college and forced her to get married at 17 or else he’d make her homeless. As a kid she told me that she wished people believed that she had meaningful opinions on events around her. One of my great grandmothers wanted to be an artist but was pressured into marrying a man who beat her. She stayed up late each night when her children were in bed writing poetry and pasting it over elaborate collages she mad herself. We still have stacks of these notebooks she created but was never allowed to do anything with. My mother wanted to be an operatic singer and was considered a musical prodigy in her town because she taught herself three seperate instruments by 13. When she was 18 she met my then 30 year old father who emotionally manipulated her into giving up her dreams to start a family with him. As a kid I would hear her up at night playing the violin or doing vocal exercises until she became too depressed to practice anymore. Like idk y’all there’s a quiet type of violence in the way women’s talents are devalued and brushed aside in favor of bullying them into “traditional” roles that ultimately don’t fulfill what they wanted for their lives. We’ve lost so much art, music, writing, science, and happiness to misogyny.