“Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.”
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Egon Schiele3
austrian painter 1890–1918Related quotes
Alice Borchardt (1939–2007) American fiction writer
Devoted
“A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.”
Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic
“In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.”
Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer
Section 4.21 <!-- p. 244 - 245 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.
Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.
Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake.
“Burn all the maps to your body. I'm not here of my own choosing.”
Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer
Laurie Penny book Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism
Source: Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2010), Chapter 2
“Now we have lit a candle to the power
Of atoms; now we know we're heirs of light
Itself…”
Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer
Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953)