capy's reviews
350 reviews

We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own: in my view that is a lazy way of talking about writing. Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned. Writing is getting comfortable with everything that has already been written—great literature and commercial literature, if useful, the novel-essay and the screenplay—and in turn becoming, within the limits of one’s own dizzying, crowded individuality, something written. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune. We mustn’t let ourselves be flattered by those who say: here’s someone who has a tonality of her own. Everything, in writing, has a long history behind it. 

With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through the fiction.

We think of blindness as separate from visual art – and yet, when we go to galleries and museums, or buy posters for our homes, or search for art online to inspire and educate us, it is blind perspectives – and other non-normative ways of seeing – that we crave. We need to recognise this hypocrisy, and that these truths have been so well hidden to so many, and deemed so unimportant to their narrative. Why is it that we can celebrate diverse viewpoints when they hang resplendent before us in gold frames, but not when they are another human being’s optical reality? 

“And I’m privileged to have a level of knowledge – I’m a computer scientist, I understand how engineering works, I know what goes into building a building, what goes into some levels of city planning. So I understand rather viscerally how things could be better. And there really is no excuse other than lack of consideration.”

Was it where they lost me
that I finally found myself?

He do the devil at four.

i try to leave home but the ocean bares its teeth
& where i'm from is where i'm from & not
where i was put

in khartoum’s bright yellow morning my grandfather brings me the season’s first mangoes & tells me it is time to come home | they are firm & green but on the inside all sunlight | i use my hands & spill the juice all down my front i fill my mouth & i do not answer

One always dies too soon-- or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are your life, and nothing else.

It’s what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one's made of.

Could hell be described as too much of anything without a break? Are variety, moderation and balance instruments we use to keep us from boiling in any inferno of excess (...)?