Week of the Titan

I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.

—Frédéric Chopin (via decembrist)

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

—Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last (via larmoyante)

‘But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.’

—Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (p. 59)

(Source: mybookhaul)

I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full belies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who
is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail
to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.

—Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, 1980. (via fuckyeahfeministartandliterature)

(Source: atreacherousthing, via fuckyeahfeministartandliterature)

Rap music is so diverse in its themes, its style, its content but when it becomes a vehicle to be talked about in mainstream news, the rap that gets in national news is always the rap music that perpetuates misogyny that is most obscene in its lyrics and then this comes to stand for what rap is. Really its for me the perfect paradigm of colonialism, that is to say, we think of rap music as a little third-world country, that young white consumers are able to go to and take out of it whatever they want. We would have to acknowledge that what young white consumers, primarily male, oftentimes suburban, most got energized by in rap music was misogyny, obscenity, pugilistic eroticism and therefore that form of rap began to make the largest sums of money.

—bell hooks, cultural criticism — rap: authentic expression or market construct?  (via sukforhonesty)

(Source: ellesugars, via thepoliticalnotebook)