Thomas

“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“It seems funny to think that healing or coming to terms with loneliness and loss, or with the damage accrued in scenes of closeness, the inevitable wounds that occur whenever people become entangled with one another, might take place by means of objects. It seems funny, and yet the more I thought about it the more prevalent it was. People make things – make art or things that are akin to art – as a way of expressing their need for contact, or their fear of it; people make objects as a way of coming to terms with shame, with grief. People make objects to strip themselves down, to survey their scars, and people make objects to resist oppression, to create a space in which they can move freely. Art doesn’t have to have a reparative function, any more than it has a duty to be beautiful or moral. All the same, there is art that gestures towards repair; that, like Wojnarowicz’s stitched loaf of bread, traverses the fragile space between separation and connection.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“What if I start making art again? What if I just did that? That is the thing I love, that is the thing I miss the most. For so long I have believed I could never catch up, but now I realize there’s nothing to catch up to, there’s only what I choose to make. There’s still time, I think. I have so much time left.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”
― James Baldwin