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Excerpts from an interview with Vladimir Nabokov (1971).

Q: What do you do to prepare yourself for the ordeals of life?
A: Shave every morning before bath and breakfast so as to be ready to fly far at short notice.

Q: What are the literary virtues you seek to attain— and how?
A: Mustering the best words, with every available lexical, associative, and rhythmic assistance, to express as closely as possible what one wants to express.

Q: What struggles these days for pride of place in your mind?
A: Meadows. A meadow with Scarce Heath butterflies in North Russia, another with Grinnell’s Blue in Southern California. That sort of thing.

Q: What kinds of power do you favor, and which do you oppose?
A: To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

Q: What are the large issues that you can’t get interested in, and what are you most concerned with?
A: The larger the issue the less it interests me. Some of my best concerns are microscopic patches of color.

via iCiNG

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A lire sur le même site : 25 choses qu'une fille devrait vivre dans sa vie

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“The people in my classes, including me, did not need to be controlled, managed, nor even taught. What we needed was to be encouraged, accepted & loved just for who we were. We needed not to be governed by a set of rules that would tell us what we needed to learn & what we needed to express, but to be given time in a supportive space to explore who we were & what we wanted, with the assistance of others who had our best interests at heart. I believe that is true not only for my students, but for all of us, humans & nonhumans alike. All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love & be loved, to be accepted, cherished & celebrated simply for being who we are.“

Derrick Jensen

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... et pour finir, en guise de mot d'ordre pour ce weekend ensoleillé, souvenez-vous : Everybody's free to wear sunscreen !