Sara Suleri famous quotes

Shahid has grown increasingly committed to the art of indignation, waking up in the morning with an expression of incipient disgust already in stock for all the affronts he will surely encounter during the course of the day.
-- Sara Suleri

#Morning #Art #Expression

For never has there been, in modern times, such a Homeric world, where so much value is pinned onto the utterance of name! Entire conversations, entire lives, are devoted to the act of naming people, and in Pakistan the affluent would be totally devoid of talk if they were unable to take names in vain. Caste and all its subclassifications are recreated every day in the structure of a conversation that knows which names to name ...
-- Sara Suleri

#Names #People #Would Be

New Haven cultivates ... an open gloom that seems happy to acknowledge disrepair and the superfluity of appearance. ... I realized that what cramped the town was the weight of unwritten volumes: they scored lines of unfinished writing on every second face that walked the streets ...
-- Sara Suleri

#Writing #Cities #Weight

To mourn, perhaps, is simply to prolong a posture of astonishment ...
-- Sara Suleri

#Grief #Astonishment #Posture

Your fingertips across my skin, the palm trees swaying in the wind - images. You sang me Spanish lullabies, the sweetest sadness in your eyes - clever trick. / I cannot go to the ocean, I cannot drive the streets at night, I cannot wake up in the morning without you on my mind, so you're gone and I'm haunted, and I bet you are just - fine. Did I make it that easy to walk right in and out of my life?

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.

Happy insect! what can be In happiness compared to thee? Fed with nourishment divine, The dewy morning's gentle wine! Nature waits upon thee still, And thy verdant cup does fill; 'Tis fill'd wherever thou dost tread, Nature's self's thy Ganymede.

I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter. I went to bed. Eight o'clock the next morning I was up writing again.

The truth and the facts aren't necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead of ideas.

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.

Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.