Turtles All the Way Down

Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow.

- The Hours: A Novel (1998)

Image: #92 by Cindy Sherman via Art Blart

Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don’t think it’s performing a character, really, if the character you’re performing is yourself. I don’t see that as playing a role. It’s just appearing in public.

- Interview in The Believer (2012)

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, ‘Does he have to be old?

We live in a time when no one wants to remember. We pretend we are where it starts. Look at the way we live—we build houses on cliffs, on fault lines, in the path of things, and when something happens, we don’t learn history, we build it again, right on the same spot, bigger, better… Fallout accumulates. What we’ve got now is a blend of fact and fiction that we’re agreeing to call reality.

- This Book Will Save Your Life (2007)

“I am forty-one years old. I came back to American four years ago to make myself into something.” Anhil leaned forward. “Explain, why does everyone in America pretend to be blind? They practice not seeing. They get into the car and they call someone on the cell phone. They are afraid to be alone but they don’t see the people around them.”

- This Book Will Save Your Life (2007)

It was not until she had talked to him for a few minutes that she saw that there was something about his face which belied the sun tan, made the blue blazer seem a kind of fancy dress. His gaze flickered around her without ever quite settling upon her; his smile was less a smile than a tic.

- Run River (1963)

The world is already constituted, but also never completely consituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities.

- Phenomenology of Perception (1962)

If on the other hand we admit that all these ‘projections’, all these ‘associations’, all these ‘transferences’ are based on some intrinsic characteristic of the object, the ‘human world’ ceases to be a metaphor and becomes once more what it really is, the seat and as it were the homeland of our thoughts.

- Phenomenology of Perception (1962)

The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.

- Phenomenology of Perception (1962)

Everybody maintains an identity that is in part counterfeit, and we all devote considerable time and energy to perpetuating the fraud and selling it to others.

- The Body Silent (1987)