Christopher Moncrieff, afterword to The Devil in the Flesh

• "l'ennui de la clarté" - the 'boredom of clarity' that afflicts the French nation, which, since its triumph during the Enlightenment, an era when it justifiably called itself great, has declined into a decadence of understanding everything, a permanent state of "cafard", or depression, where philosophical and heroic ideals have given way to the worship of sensual pleasure, the gratification of desires.

http://www.randomhouse.ca/hazlitt/blog/what-do-we-actually-want-social-media-do

• Throughout history, significant changes have been engendered by the externalization of basic human connective tissue through media: writing/externalized thought, photography/sight, film/the moving image, and so on. Each of those various changes effected massive change, because taking a dimension of thought and turning it into an object or a thing outside the body has huge ramifications...
• Can you extricate the products of modernity from modernity itself? No. You can only fight to inch closer to the vision of the world you want, or carve out something resembling an ethical space for yourself.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/02/catherine-robbe-grillet-french-dominatrix

• “There is this little universe,” Beverly explains about the ceremonies, “where a few people offer their freedom and renounce their will and give it to another. One goes into what we call ‘the bubble,’ where what’s outside no longer exists and inside one person is possessed by another. It is not a game; it is a spiritual experience.”