The Argonauts

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The ple

I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it.

One happy thing that can happen, according to Sedgwick, is that pleasure becomes accretive as well as autotelic: the more it’s felt and displayed, the more proliferative, the more possible, the more habitual, it becomes.

They seemed to make a fetish of the unsaid, rather than simply letting it be contained in the sayable.

This comes as no real surprise—my mother and her entire family line are obsessed with skinniness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness.

That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.

So far as I can tell, most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself.

The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic…. [Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.

I find it irresistibly interesting when people are cathected onto their bad style rather than simply oblivious to it (a description that may apply to us all; I sense the risk increases with age).