Elaine Scarry Quotes
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Our desire for beauty is likely to outlast its object because, as Kant once observed, unlike all other pleasures, the pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible. No matter how long beautiful things endure, they cannot out-endure our longing for them.
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To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.
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Injury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadvertently produced on the way to producing something else but is the relentless object of all military activity.
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The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.
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The room...is converted into a weapon, ... made to demonstrate that everything is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are annihilated: there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no door, no chair, no bed.
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The chapter ends by showing that nuclear war more closely approximates the model of torture than the model of conventional war because it is a structural impossibility that the populations whose bodies are used in the confirmation process can have exercised any consent over this use of their bodies.
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The material world constrain us, often with gret beneficence, to see each person and thing in its time and place, its historical context. But mental life doesn't so constrain us. It is porous, open to air and light, swings forward while swaying back, scatters its stripes in all directions, and delights to find itself beached beside something invented only that morning or instead standing beside an altar from three millennia ago.
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How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
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Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land.
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Beauty as a “greeting”. At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral background as though coming forward to welcome you – as thought the object were designated to “fit” your perception.
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This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.
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The boy in war is, to an extent found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor. … He is a fragment of American earth wedged into an open hillside in Korea and reworked by its unbearable sun and rain. … He is a light brown vessel of red Australian blood that will soon be opened and emptied across the rocks and ridges of Gallipoli from which he can never again become distinguishable.
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When we come upon beautiful things they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space.
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To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.
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Beauty brings copies of itself into being.
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The larger the prisoner's pain (the smaller the prisoner's world and therefore by comparison) the larger the torturer's world... pain becomes power... the torturer uses the prisoner's aliveness to crush the things that he lives for.
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Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down.
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Beauty always takes place in the particular.
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This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.
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When one goes on to find "better", or "higher", or "truer", or "more enduring", or "more widely agreed upon" forms of beauty, what happens to our regard for the less good, less high, less true, less universal instances? Simone Weil says, "He who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the world itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before".
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What is striking about such unmediated juxtapositions, and relevant to the way in which at the end of war opened bodies and verbal issues are placed side by side, is that in most instances the verbal assertion has no source of substantiation other than the body.
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Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them suddenly all problems would subside.
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Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation. Beauty, according to its critics, causes us to gape and suspend all thought.