Quotes About Particularity

Fiction should be specific rather than general, because people are specific.

It was like seeing someone who wore a striped tie or parted his hair on the left — a detail, but not a telling one.

Success is in the details.

When the Self dissolves into a world of separate selves and death becomes real, love becomes a pact with grief; what is gained then is the inescapability poignant fact of individuality. There will never be another you, and I love the stubborn particularity of you because you will disappear.

We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable.

The senses, and one's own body overall, present the mystery of a whole that, without leaving behind its haeccity and its particularity, emits beyond itself significations capable of offering a framework for an entire series of thoughts and experiences.

In my history books I have already had my say in clear language and discursive meaning about community. Now what history means to me in images is freedom from coherence, clarity, and collective representation. My images carry their own visual meaning, which may or may not explicate history usefully or unequivocally. For me now, image works as particularity, not as generalization. That is how art school changed my thinking about history and how visual art set me free.

We get something out of them only by wrestling with their "historical particularity" (as some put it) and then doing the hard work of accepting the sacred responsibility of discerning how all of that works out here and now in whatever situation we find ourselves.