champorado

God could only be a fruit of our anemia: a tottering and rachitic image. He is mild, good, sublime, just. But who recognizes himself in that mixture of redolent of rose water, relegated to transcendence? A Being without duplicity lacks depth, lacks mystery; He hides nothing. Only impurity is a sign of reality. And if the saints are not completely stripped of interest, it is because their sublimity is tinged with the novelistic, their eternity lends itself to biography; their lives indicate that they have left the world for a genre capable of captivating us from time to time….

Because he overflows with life, the Devil has no altar: man recognizes himself too readily in him to worship him; he detests him for good reason; he repudiates himself, and maintains the indigent attributes of God. But the Devil never complains and never aspires to found a religion: are we not here to safeguard him from inanition and oblivion?

— Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

Since childhood, I’ve been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them, because monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection, and they allow and embody the possibility of failing and live.

I knew that monsters were far more gentle and more desirable than the monsters living inside ‘nice people.’ Accepting that you are a monster gives you the leeway to not behave like one. When you deny being a monster, you behave like one.

— Guillermo Del Toro

Politics

Sometimes, the skin comes off in sex. The people merge, skinless. The body loses its boundaries. We are in these separate bodies; and then, with someone and not with someone else, the skin dissolves altogether; and what touches is unspeakably, grotesquely visceral, not inside language or

conceptualization, not inside time; raw, blood and fat and muscle and bone, unmediated by form or formal limits. There is no physical distance, no self-consciousness, nothing withdrawn or private or alienated, no existence outside physical touch. The skin collapses as a boundary.

– Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than your ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create.

— Why The Lucky Stiff

When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naïve. It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything.

I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight.

— Waymond Wang, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022)