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“Attempts to juggle domestic responsibilities with artistic production have often resulted in smaller bodies of work, and often works smaller in scale, than those produced by male contemporaries. Yet art history continues to privilege prodigious output and monumental scale or conception over the selective and the intimate.”

“Attempts to limit female mobility by hampering locomotion are ancient and almost universal. The foot-binding of upper-class Chinese girls and the Nigerian custom of loading women's legs with pounds of heavy brass wire are extreme examples, but all over the world similar stratagems have been employed to make sure that once you have caught a woman she cannot run away, and even if she stays around she cannot keep up with you. ... Literally as well as figuratively modern women's shoes are what keeps Samantha from running as fast as Sammy.”

“Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.' All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was: There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man! Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.”

“Attempts to narrow the referents of the term woman - which refers to half the world's population - to a politically obsolete elite consisting only of privileged, ignorant, upper-class white women are often made by those who belong to this group themselves, so-called 'white cis women'. This can seem odd - are they not pulling the rug out from under their own feet? On the other hand, it may be a smart move, in that a seemingly self-critical attitude allows them to secure their position, symbolically distancing themselves from their identity. Striking first, they anticipate the critique that could be directed towards them, by being the harshest critic of their own circumstances. Thus they are no longer the 'white cis woman' but the 'critic of white cis women'.”

“Attempts to stop smoking or give up any sort of self-destructive addictive behavior such as drugs, alcohol, hypersexuality, overeating, or overworking, often fail because it is very difficult to give up a means of self-regulation even when it is unhealthy until it can be replaced with a better form of self-regulation.”

“Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love. Eros won't outlast duality. As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

“Atten. Pray of what disease did Mr. Badman die, for now I perceive we are come up to his death? Wise. I cannot so properly say that he died of one disease, for there were many that had consented, and laid their heads together to bring him to his end. He was dropsical, he was consumptive, he was surfeited, was gouty, and, as some say, he had a tang of the pox in his bowels. Yet the captain of all these men of death that came against him to take him away, was the consumption, for it was that that brought him down to the grave.”

“Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speed than ever before, To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to “access” information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The world has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences (61).”

“Attendez!... Je choisis mes rimes... Là, j'y suis. (Il fait ce qu'il dit, à mesure.) Je jette avec grâce mon feutre, Je fais lentement l'abandon Du grand manteau qui me calfeutre, Et je tire mon espadon; Élégant comme Céladon, Agile comme Scaramouche, Je vous préviens, cher Mirmidon, Qu'à la fin de l'envoi, je touche! (Premier engagement de fer.) Vous auriez bien dû rester neutre; Où vais-je vous larder, dindon ?... Dans le flanc, sous votre maheutre ?... Au coeur, sous votre bleu cordon ?... - Les coquilles tintent, ding-don ! Ma pointe voltige: une mouche ! Décidément... c'est au bedon, Qu'à la fin de l'envoi, je touche. Il me manque une rime en eutre... Vous rompez, plus blanc qu'amidon ? C'est pour me fournir le mot pleutre ! - Tac! je pare la pointe dont Vous espériez me faire don: - J'ouvre la ligne, - je la bouche... Tiens bien ta broche, Laridon ! A la fin de l'envoi, je touche. (Il annonce solennellement:) Envoi Prince, demande à Dieu pardon ! Je quarte du pied, j'escarmouche, Je coupe, je feinte... (Se fendant.) Hé! Là donc! (Le vicomte chancelle, Cyrano salue.) A la fin de l'envoi, je touche.”

“Attending a funeral would leave the average person insane, if they truly believed that sooner or later they are also going to die.”

“Attention and respect give pleasure, however late, or however useless. But they are not useless, when they are late, it is reasonable to rejoice, as the day declines, to find that it has been spent with the approbation of mankind.”

“Attention, as well as being a commodity that can be monetised through digital platforms, is a psychological wage. We know this from when we are children: think of the heaven of basking in the glow of an attentive parent or teacher. To be recognised is to be told that you matter, that your life has worth and that you have a place in the world. There’s nothing unhealthy about that. But our media and politics leverage the psychological wages of attention in a way that is utterly corrosive and warping.”

“Attention, God the Judge, God the Father, who Art in Heaven, give me one miracle, please. If You exist as I know You do, even if no one else in the world believes in You, please give me a brain tumor. Please tear my limbs from their sockets and let the backseat and my older sister be totally covered with blood. Please make me dumb and blind and deaf, please make me a martyr, please, dear heavenly Father. Tear my heart right from my chest. Drive spikes into my eyes and let hot lava shoot out of my mouth. Make me silent and thoroughly dead, but please hurry. Before we get home, before we reach the next stoplight, let the only sound be no sound, the silence of my death burning in the empty sky. If You are a mighty and true God, if You are not just a dream I have made up, please, before another hour, another minute passes, let the wire in my bra poke through my heart. Dear Lord, please, please, give me this one miracle. I have begged You every day, every evening, so please, let Your will be done, let Your will be done. Give me a gruesome death as fast as You possibly can. Thank you, God. Amen.”

Author:Joe Meno