#intimacy

The demand to be intimate or honest with a public can be invasive when the experiences of racial others are commodified as stories or objects that might be traded as evidence of intimacy, as proof of 'being good,' for nonracial others. In this way, intimacy might act as surveillance, through which some people--women of color, for instance--must reveal themselves to bear the burden of representation ('You are here as an example') and the weight of pedagogy ('Teach us about your people'). Intimacy can be a force--especially when others set its terms and conditions. So what if you don't love the (white) girls who exhaust you, who want too much from you, who want to turn you into a commodity or a badge or an experience to share? What if you become a girl in opposition to other girls? This is also the problem with definitions of racism as ignorance, and ignorance as the absence of intimacy--which posits that intimacy is the solution to ignorance. This gives us terrible, stupid disavowals like 'I'm not racist, I have black friends,' as if intimacy is a shield that protects the wearer from harm. It limits our sense of what racism is to the scale of the interpersonal, when it is in fact this enormous constellation of forces and moving parts that structures our institutions--and so-called institutions--profoundly. ↗

— Mimi Thi Nguyen

#ignorance #intimacy #race #racism #experience

I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds; they repair the broken skin. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#lauren-oliver #broken

I love telling stories. I love the intimacy between the writer and reader. When you write sketches it's over in two minutes. When you write a book the characters have to have a bit of emotional depth. ↗

— David Walliams

#bit #book #characters #depth #emotional

San Francisco has always been my favorite booing city. I don't mean the people boo louder or longer, but there is a very special intimacy. When they boo you, you know they mean you. Music, that's what it is to me. One time in Kezar Stadium they gave me a standing boo. ↗

— George Halas

#been #boo #booing #city #favorite

Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between losing a best friend and losing a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumphs and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you'd start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realizing you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#intimacy

I think that musicians should never forget about the intimacy of bringing two people together, and the aesthetic transference where you're almost vicariously involved in a romance between other people. ↗

— Joe Williams

#aesthetic #almost #between #bringing #forget

If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust. ↗

— Lord Chesterfield

#aside #breeding #coarse #contempt #days

I feel drawn to experiment with ways that technology can interact with notions of intimacy, because so much of technology is done in a way that's very cold and has such an opposite effect. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#cold #done #drawn #effect #experiment

Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy. ↗

— William Hazlitt

#breach #break #break up #dine #engagements

You're creating an intimacy that everybody feels, that it's their experience, not yours. I'll never introduce a song and say, now this song is about 'my' broken heart. ↗

— Diana Krall

#broken #broken heart #creating #everybody #experience