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Leila Chatti, from “Tea”

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sunset & cloud studies (2021) oil pastel on paper

shop: suhaylah.bigcartel.com instagram: @suhaylah.h

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hélène delmaire / cuno amiet / piet raemdonck / chris gambrell / marlies van boekel / linda christensen

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every time it rains i think of that raymond carver poem. poetry is like prayer to me methinks. or an incantation

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Leonid Brahilovsky - The Blue Moscow, 1920th

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“Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”

— Everyone Into The Grinder

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At the River Clarion, Mary Oliver

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Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I'd look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I'd just feel a prayer.

L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

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“Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.”

Dr. Alfred Griswold

(Alfred Eisenstaedt. 1950)

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Clarice Lispector, from "Miss Algrave" in Soulstorm: Stories

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"Illusion gives us heightened joys unknown to pedestrians and realists. And these people who resist intoxication by the drugs of imagination or aesthetics are those who seek it out of wine bottles, or drugs like opium." -Anais Nin, Diaries Volume 2

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"Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you." - Anais Nin, Diaries Volume 2

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“Here have I cause, in men just blame to find, That in their proper prayse too partiall bee, And not indifferent to woman kind, To whom no share in armes and chevalrie They do impart, ne maken memorie Of their brave gestes and prowess martiall; Scarse do they spare to one or two or three, Rowme in their writs; yet the same writing small Does all their deeds deface, and dims their glories all, But by record of antique times I find, That women wont in warres to beare most sway, And to all great exploits them selves inclind: Of which they still the girlond bore away, Till envious Men fearing their rules decay, Gan coyne straight laws to curb their liberty; Yet sith they warlike armes have layd away: They have exceld in artes and policy, That now we foolish men that prayse gin eke."

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"In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying. An intelligence which aims at the definitive resolution (that is, suppression) of conflict, which justifies manipulation - always, of course, for other people's good...- is not my normative idea of intelligence."

Susan Sontag - The Salmagundi Interview

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“I want to be a bad girl I want to be a bad girl so there’s a musicality to my rebellion To be a bad girl is to be one of the most furious things in the modern world To be a bad girl is to be one of the most admonished things in the modern world A bad girl is she who has rid herself of the brutalities of socialization The antithesis of the bad girl is the man who self destructs” 

― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

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“To my mind, joy is a constitutive part of the emotional rhetoric and comportment of those against whom the present swells at an annihilating pace. With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.” 

― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

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“You can't tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.” 

― Rachel Cusk, Kudos