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“I am responsible for everything… except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

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«...if in fact the ends that I am pursuing could be attained through a purely arbitrary wish, if itwere enough to wish for something in order to obtain it, and if the use of implements were notdetermined by definite rules, I would never be able to distinguish within me a desire from avolition, or a dream from an act, or the possible from the real.»

[Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" quoted in Matthew Ratcliffe's "We are our Possibilities: From Sartre to Beauvoir to Løgstrup"]

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“Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being—like a worm.”

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Sartre, Being and Nothingness

12/11/22

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“If I had an essence, I would never cease to be me — my nature could never be anything else. If I had no essence, whose nature would it be to be anything else? … The sage avoids being and nothingness.”

— Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Batchelor tr. (Ch 15)

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Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

Emil Cioran, from Tears and Saints, 1937

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“The simulacrum now hides, not the truth, but the fact that there is none, that is to say, the continuation of Nothingness.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Radical Thought

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“Freedom is not created, because it is not nature; freedom existed before the world began, it is rooted in immemorial nothingness.”

— Nikolai Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit

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““Today we have so much access to information in other ways that we are on a collision with the fact that people are not interested in what does not serve immediately their interest,” she said, with resignation, “and this is a very sad realisation.””

— Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent revisited | Europe | Al Jazeera

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“[T]he U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit—indeed, encourage—spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness.”

— Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent

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“New York Times’ foreign affair commentator Leslie Gelb justified classifying Vietnam as an ‘outlaw’ on the grounds that they had killed Americans. This reflects the common establishment view implicit in [George H.W.] Bush’s comment that nobody has a right of self defense against this country even if it intervenes across the ocean to impose, by force, a government that the people of that country reject.”

—Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent

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“We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

— Arundhati Roy, The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture, 4 November 2004

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“Je voulais organiser les fantasmes de mon imagination.”

— Italo Calvino

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“Cresciuto in tempi di dittatura, raggiunto dalla guerra totale in età di leva m'è rimasta l'idea che il vivere in pace e in libertà sia una fragile fortuna, che da un momento all'altro potrebbe essermi tolta nuovamente.”

— Italo Calvino, da Album Calvino, a cura di Luca Baranelli ed Ernesto Ferrero, Oscar Mondadori, Milano, 2003, p. 6

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Io invece, in mezzo a tanto fervore d'interezza, mi sentivo sempre più triste e manchevole. Alle volte uno si crede incompleto ed è soltanto giovane.

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“Il segreto della semplicità di Natalia è qui: questa voce che dice “io” ha sempre di fronte personaggi che stima superiori a lei, situazioni che sembrano troppo complesse per le sue forze, e i mezzi linguistici e concettuali che essa usa per rappresentarli sono sempre un po’ al di sotto delle esigenze. Ed è da questa sproporzione che nasce la tensione poetica. La poesia è sempre stata questo: far passare il mare in un imbuto: fissarsi uno strettissimo numero di mezzi espressivi e cercare di esprimere con quello qualcosa di estremamente complesso.”

— Italo Calvino, da Album Calvino, a cura di Luca Baranelli ed Ernesto Ferrero, Oscar Mondadori, Milano, 2003, p. 107

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“I insist on being light in the way that Calvino talks about it. How does he describe it? Here in Six Memos for the Next Millennium: “Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarified consistency.””

— Kay Ryan, The Art of Poetry No. 94, Interviewed by Sarah Fay, Issue 187, Winter 2008

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In writing, what speaks is what is repressed.

Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies; from 'I Also Try to Tell My Tale', tr. William Weaver