“Counter to the avalanche of messages from our culture, I recognize celibacy not as negation but as a joyous turning inward. “Inebriate of air am I, / And debauchee of dew,” wrote Emily Dickinson, most promiscuous of celibates. “Opulence in asceticism,” Marianne Moore wrote, a phrase that celebrates the solitary life even as it provides a sound bite for saving the planet.”
"Going it alone" (2015)
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Fenton Johnson 5
American novelist 1953Related quotes
“Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening.”
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 624
Context: Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.
Source: Infinite in All Directions (1988), Ch. 7 : Roots
“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”
Source: Wild Geese
“For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.”
Global Bass interview (2000)
http://artdistricts.com/clandestine-culture-between-street-art-and-social-activism/
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close