I am. I am. I am.

I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawingroom, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits…

Edith Wharton, from The Fullness of Life

nemophilies:

Michelangelo Antonioni, L'Avventura

The body is never in the present, it contains the before and the after, tiredness and waiting. Tiredness and waiting, even despair are the attitudes of the body. No one has gone further than Antonioni in this direction. His method: the interior through behaviour, no longer experience, but ‘what remains of past experiences’, ‘what comes afterwards, when everything has been said’, such a method necessarily proceeds via the attitude or postures of the body.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II

Sometimes everything seems just like a dream. It’s not my dream, but someone else’s, that I have to participate in. What happens when the one who dreamt us wakes up and feels ashamed?

Ingmar Bergman, Shame

The full moon
reflected in water,
the water
contained in the bowl,
and the thirsty man
deep in sleep.

Abbas Kiarostami, A Wolf Lying in Wait, trans. Karim Emami & Michael Beard

You won’t believe it but
I quench my thirst
by drinking from a mirage.

Abbas Kiarostami, A Wolf Lying in Wait, trans. Karim Emami & Michael Beard

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Somewhere there is a man who has given away everything
and stands in the rain, grateful
Somewhere the dead are leaving a sign
Somewhere there is a man who meets his late mother
in Lisbon
Somewhere a man makes soup for the village
Somewhere a man tells a woman she is not
as alone as she thinks and she understands
she is precisely as alone

Anne Michaels, from “Somewhere Night Is Falling” in All We Saw: Poems

soracities:

“What is it we love or fear
but shadows of ourselves?”
Adonis, Elegies in Exile

“What can we love that’s not a shadow?”
Alejandra Pizarnik, Memories from the Little House of Song

“O she was but a shadow, and slipped from me.”
W.B. Yeats, The Shadowy Waters

nemophilies:

“You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image: you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.”
– Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes
“As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for “sentimental” reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.”
— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
– Susan Sontag, On Photography