People use the word "natural" ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the Sunday school teachings.
When I speak about 'we,' it gets very complex very quickly. Having grown up in the United States, but also being very much a member of Nigerian societies and also different parts of Nigerian societies, I understand that we construct particular 'we's.'
Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.
Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, 'Romeo and Juliet,' the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.
..and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too; that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin.
The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.
I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all.
Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers
The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction.
A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
There was no normal. There never had been. "Normal" and "natural" were the biggest lies we'd ever created.
Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.
The way I think we were living is an invention. The truth is nobody can own anything. That was an unheard-of concept among indigenous people. We invented that.
We are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.
Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.
I feel like we want women to be simpler, less complex, so we project a lot of versions of simplicity onto them to fit that.
Time is man made - No woman would have ever invented time.
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
