Addison Nugent

“The unity of style not only of the Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses in each case the different structure of social power, and not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general was enclosed. The great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life goes unheard”
― Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

“Tonight - I am alone in the night,
a homeless and sleepless nun!
Tonight I hold all the keys to this
the only capital city

and lack of sleep guides me on my path.
You are so lovely, my dusky Kremlin!
Tonight I put my lips to the breast
of the whole round and warring earth.

Now I feel hair - like fur - standing on end:
the stifling winds blow straight into my soul.
Tonight I feel compassion for everyone,
those who are pitied, along with those who are kissed.”
― Marina Tsvetaeva

“Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.”
― Harold Pinter, Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics