suffering the ideal

What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away. Part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called ‘objective’; because you can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous.

Anne Carson, ”Foam (Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni”

“Quotations in my writing,” said Walter Benjamin on page 570 of volume 1 of his Collected Works, “are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve the idle passerby of his convictions.”

(via invisiblestories)

(Source: msodradek, via invisiblestories)