“We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”
— Albert Einstein
“Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.”
— C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
“We are more alike than unlike, my dear Captain…I have pores. Humans have pores. I have… fingerprints. Humans have fingerprints. My chemical nutrients are like your blood. If you prick me…do I not…leak?”
— Data, Star Trek: The Next Generation
“Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience.”
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
“How come we’ve got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud . . . I’ll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.”
— Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy— serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
“I believe in a long, prolonged, derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown.”
— Jim Morrison
“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited, all my ancestors.”
— Jorge Luis Borges
“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.”
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics
“How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality— or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?”
— Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
— Franz Kafka