Extracts
On Flesh
A collage of passages and images from the Fall 2016 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find Extracts of other issues on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack.
Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.
—Willem de Kooning, 1949
The truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music, its earth-castings. Bodies never lie.
—Agnes de Mille, 1975
I love anyone—at least a little—who touches me. Anyone who touches me gives me something in that instant: my body.
—Susan Sontag, 1970
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.
—Anaïs Nin, 1935
Allow the ear to hear what it likes, the eye to see what it likes, the nose to smell what it likes, the mouth to say what it likes, the body to enjoy the comforts it likes to have, and the mind to do what it likes.
—Yang Zhu, c. 400 BC
I was born to a greater destiny than to be a mere chattel of my body.
—Seneca the Younger, c. 64
Nothing, in fact, is less common and less communicable, and therefore more securely shielded against the visibility and audibility of the public realm, than what goes on within the confines of the body.
—Hannah Arendt, 1958
Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.
—First Epistle to the Corinthians, c. 54
Because our spiritual experiences consist of reproductions and combinations of sensory impressions, it seems to me that the conception of a soul without a body is empty and meaningless.
—Albert Einstein, 1921
The mind is attached to the body in rather the same way as a man is to the planet. The planet turns and is part of him, and he is unaware of it.
—Paul Valéry, c. 1940
In love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body’s surface of its terrible, basic importance.
—Milan Kundera, 1969
If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window.
—Samuel Beckett, 1951
Every tooth in a man’s head is more valuable than a diamond.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605
All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.
—Fran Lebowitz, 1978
Given equal mindlessness, what matters is the difference in body mass. An idiot should not take up too much space.
—Karl Kraus, 1909
O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!
—William Shakespeare, c. 1596
Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs.
—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1861
I can only talk from the perspective of a woman. I cannot speak for a man. I have never been a man yet.
—Louise Bourgeois, 2004
I don’t think there is anything wrong with celebrating women’s bodies, but if that’s all you’re interested in, you’re missing an awful lot.
—Betty Friedan, 1992
A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
—Leonard Cohen, 1963
Asymmetry in sexual education maintains men’s power in the myth: they look at women’s bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over.
—Naomi Wolf, 1991
It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.
—Leslie Jamison, 2014
You can divide people in many ways. Said the astonished executioner: “I just divide them into heads and bodies.”
—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, c. 1947
Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
—Henry Miller, 1956
Is there any worse misfortune than to feel your body aging long before your mind? Torture equal to the anguish of the snail if it suddenly realized how imprisoned it was in its shell.
—Malcolm de Chazal, 1947
I do not want peace nor beauty nor even freedom from pain. I want to fight and to feel new gods in the flesh.
—D.H. Lawrence, 1922
The body says what words cannot.
—Martha Graham, 1985
FLESH
Fall 2016
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