EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

• traditional cultures - the past is honored and symbols are valued because they contain and perpetuate the experience of generations.

- The Consequences of Modernity, Gidden

• utopia of utopian realism - would not be a world that 'collapses outward' into decentralized organizations but would no doubt interlace the local and global in complex fashion.

- The Consequences of Modernity, Gidden

• she simultaneously inhabits multiple linguistic spaces.
• disregard the boundary markers of these fields and urge creative trespass of fields focused on the study of difference (Koshy, Minority Cosmopolitanism)
• everyday life measures and embodies the changes which take place ‘somewhere else’ in the ‘higher realms.’ The human world is not defined simply by the historical, by culture, by totality or society as a whole, or by ideological and political superstructures. It is defined by this intermediate and mediating level: everyday life.” - Henri Lefebvre
• Language is a collection of metaphors that we’ve forgotten are metaphors.- Wordsworth.
• the freshest shoots of his own imagination, which had grown up in a soil of dreamy solitude. - on Wordsworth
• How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is much. - Shelley, On Life
• We are on the verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know! - Shelley, On Life
• how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow- Frankenstein, 31
• To know is to choose.

It is courtesy of the surrounding darkness that the light of knowledge illuminates. Eliminating, Mary Douglas famously said, is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment. First comes a vision: the image of the mind-boggling complexity and incapacitating infinity of the world reduced to endurable, absorbable, manageable, livable-with portions. 'As perceivers,' says Douglas, 'we select from all the stimuli falling on our senses... In a chaos of shifting impressions, each of us constructs a stable world in which objects have recognizable shapes.' - 'Wasted Lives' by Zygmunt Bauman

• A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually in for - and filling- some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity - he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. - Letter from John Keats to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818
• I am ambitious of doing the world some good - if I should be spared, that may be the work of maturer years. In the interval I will assay to reach to as high a summit in poetry as the nerve bestowed upon me will suffer. (John Keats)... But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself, but from some character in whose soul I now live.
• there may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personality itself?

Intelligences are atoms of perception. They know and they see and they are pure - in short, they are God. How then are souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them - so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? - John Keats, journal letter

• I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive, and yet I think I perceive it.