20 Quotes by Elaine Scarry

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.

to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.

The goal of the torturer is to make the one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it.

Physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution.

It is the intense pain that destroys a person's self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe.

In effect, writers give us a transcript of how the brain works because they look at the images turning up in their own minds with such concentration and dedication.

What is imagining like? Like being a plant. What is imagining? It is not-perception: it is instead the quasi-percipient, slightly percipient, almost percipient, not yet percipient, after-percipient of perceptual mimesis. Like the rolled-back pale peach of the daylily Oakleigh, it is not sentience but sentience rolled back.

...because material composition so unquestionably entails motion (making a sculpture or a shield or a painting requires motion just as much as walking or horseback riding or rising from one's chair does), we may be predisposed to discover it in mental composition as well.

We find ourselves contemplating at once the compositional surface on which motion occurs and the things that move on that compositional surface because imagining motion requires us to blur the distinction between figure and ground, as when passengers sitting in a stationary train feel themselves begin to fall through space when another train passes by.