“Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations.”
Source: Nightwood (1936), Ch. 5 : Watchman, What of the Night?
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Djuna Barnes39
American Modernist writer, poet and artist 1892–1982Related quotes
Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd (1825–1899) British writer and minister
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 22.
Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer
"I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape" http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.html (1983). <br class="br">Context: I want to see this men's movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don't make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can't be self-indulgent.
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher
Source: La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie) (1960), Ch. 2, sect. 3
“The starlight of heaven above us shall quiver
As our souls flow in one down eternity’s river.”
Thomas Osborne Davis (Irish politician) (1814–1845) Irish writer and activist
The Welcome.
George Howard Earle, Jr. (1856–1928) American lawyer
On 3 October 1896, at a Republican meeting in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, Earle urged his "fellow citizens" to vote for McKinley over Bryan (Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 Oct 1896)
Carl I. Hagen (1944) Norwegian politician
In his book Ærlig talt (2007) in a chapter revolving around the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, cited in Vårt Land (15 November 2007) http://www.vl.no/samfunn/article15494.zrm