Steffani Jemison Quote

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“I used to think that time is just one thing, the way a ruler is always the same length, twelve inches or twenty-four inches or even a yard.

Then I started to run and learned that time is only like distance if we measure distance with taffy or rubber bands or chewing gum or pleats, anything that can expand wide like an accordion or shrink small enough to swallow.

I found that the twenty or thirty minutes of a run could feel like the longest twenty minutes of your life. The final block, the final leg, the final lap, the final half mile – they could feel like the longest hundred feet in the world.

Even when I ran every day, when I felt I could never imagine being more accustomed to something than I was accustomed to running, even then, I sometimes felt I would never reach the end.

There are things you do because they’re easy and there are other things you do.”

– Steffani Jemison, A Rock, A River, A Street


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I try to imagine what my life might have been like if I had never become an artist...

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I try to imagine what my life might have been like if I had never become an artist. To imagine my life being opposite. And the first thing that comes to mind is myself as an eccentric. That without the release valve of making art, my artistic impulses instead become behaviors. That I would have become a somewhat stranger person than I currently am.



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Some passages from France Daigle, Christina Sharpe, Terry Tempest Williams, Alicia Garza, Sakine Cansız, Mariame Kaba, Susan Sontag, Lisa Wells, Lorraine O’Grady, Paul Valéry, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Carolyn Forché, Ann Snitow, Nicholas Ridout, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, McKenzie Wark, Ricardo Piglia, Lynne Tillman and Fernando Pessoa (an ongoing series)

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Some lines from For Sure by France Daigle (Translated by Robert Majzels)

Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Some passages from What Love Looks Like: A Conversation with Tim DeChristopher by Terry Tempest Williams

Some passages from The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall by Alicia Garza

Some passages from Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary by Sakine Cansız

Some passages from We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba

Some lines from the first two volumes of Susan Sontag's diaries

Some passages from Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells

Some passages from Writing in Space, 1973–2019 by Lorraine O’Grady

Six Paul Valéry Quotes

Some passages from M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Some passages from What You Have Heard Is True by Carolyn Forché

Some passages from The Feminism of Uncertainty by Ann Snitow

Four passages from Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems by Nicholas Ridout

Three passages from Islands of Decolonial Love by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Four passages from The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark

Some of my favourite passages from Artificial Respiration by Ricardo Piglia

Two short passages from Haunted Houses by Lynne Tillman

Six Fernando Pessoa Quotes



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Quotations on pessimism, fame, individualism, loneliness, sex, suicide and failure (an ongoing list)

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Six quotations on pessimism

Sixteen quotations on fame

Six quotations on individualism

Thirteen quotations on loneliness

Four quotations on sex

Eight quotations on suicide

Twenty-seven quotations on failure



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