Text
Christa Wolf, from “Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays”
Florence and The Machine, from “Cassandra”
6K notes
·
View notes
Text
Barbie is both toy and mythic object - modern woman and Ur-woman - navelless, motherless, and incarnation of “The One Goddess with a Thousand Names.” In the reservoir of communal memory that psychologist Carl Jung has termed the “collective unconscious,” Barbie is an archetype of something ancient, matriarchal, and profound.
In Barbie’s universe, women are not the second sex. Barbie’s genesis subverts the biblical myth of Genesis, which Camille Paglia has described as “a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults.” Just as the goddess-based religions antedated Judeo-Christian monotheism, Barbie came before Ken. The whole idea of woman as temptress, or woman as subordinate to man, is absent from the Barbie cosmology. Ken is a gnat, a fly, a slave, an accessory of Barbie. Barbie was made perfect: her body has not evolved dramatically with time. Ken, by contrast, was a blunder: first scrawny, now pumped-up, his ever-changing body is neither eternal nor talismanic.��
Critics who ignore Barbie’s mythic dimension often find fault with her lifestyle. But it is mythologically imperative that she live the way she does. Of course Barbie inhabits a prelapsarian paradise of consumer goods; she has never been exiled from the garden.
Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll by M.G. Lord
266 notes
·
View notes
Text
Agnès Varda: ‘I am still alive, I am still curious. I am not a piece of rotting flesh’
8K notes
·
View notes
Text
Tove Jansson writing to Tuulikki Pietilä, 1957
23K notes
·
View notes
Text
“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
— Margaret Atwood, “The Blind Assassin”
176 notes
·
View notes
Text
Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker in "Fried Green Tomatoes" (dir. Jon Avnet - 1991).
2K notes
·
View notes
Text
it’s remarkable how much money you can save by not leaving the house and not eating and not moving
69K notes
·
View notes
Text
St. Paul says that it is better to marry than to burn, but there is marriage and there is marriage. Sometimes it may be better to burn.
Helen Dunmore, Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre; from ‘Grace Poole Her Testimony’
200 notes
·
View notes
Text
94K notes
·
View notes
Text
I promise you, i was here , i felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air - and i went on destroying inside it like wind in the strom.
7K notes
·
View notes