"We are plated with piety, not alloyed with it."

“A fierce and sentimental addiction to forms makes us shudder at change. It is much easier to say that the system is all right-only the people need to be improved.”

“the African leopard is an audacious animal, although it is ungrateful of me to say a word against him, after the way he has let me off personally ... taken as a whole, he is the most lovely animal I have ever seen; only seeing him, in the one way you can gain a full idea of his beauty, namely in his native forest, is not an unmixed joy to a person, like myself, of a nervous disposition.”

Source : Mary Kingsley (2010). “Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons”, p.543, Cambridge University Press

“Sometimes the slow ones blame the active for the delay.”

“Gossip is a very dangerous tool. We should be more wary of the gossiper, and not the gossip they're trying to relay to you.”

“Charles Bernstein's pairs of jingles of 'public discourse' are 'simultaneous double narrative / the space between's the other narrative/as if they're opposite.' In the space between, outside representation but in the 'presence' of it, we are provoked to laugh. Bernstein alters our language to open a double range that's public and mind at once and inseparable, that is 'Poetry is patterned thought in search of unpatterned mind.' Girly Man is doing it.”

“For some individuals - some soldiers, some contractors - combat provides a kind of purpose and meaning beyond which all else potentially pales in comparison.”

“What if Woody Allen called me and said, I'm working on this movie and there's a really divine role for you. We want exactly you! It would be such a fantasy. Forget it! My idol, Woody Allen!”

“I had to work out that it was something that could move, without having everybody in spray painted leotards.”