Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“Aesthetic sense is the twin of one’s instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.”

“The unusual name was supplied by [Elijah] Bond’s sister-in-law, medium Helen Peters, who asked the board for a name and watched as it spelled O-U-I-J-A (although there’s also been speculation that the name is a combination of the French and German words for ‘yes’).”

“Stared at as closely or keenly as possible, even the most elegant, precise, or selfsame forms are revealed as monsters.”

“It’s always wonderful when something altogether wrong ends right, without the help of either religion or the police.”

“In that moment, I made peace with my family—by which I mean that I realized I never wanted to see them again, and I was at peace with that.”

“He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversationalist.”

“I have always distrusted good people. I never believed as a child that goodness came naturally. I always suspected that beneath it lay some sort of payment for services past or still to come.”

“A portrait is a picture with something wrong with the mouth.”

“This is Mr. Vignelli’s map, which everyone can see is an aesthetically pleasing map. And it’s made some lovely T-shirts for us at the MTA. But there is no relationship between the subway routes on this map and the city above. I’m a native New Yorker and I know what New York looks like, and it doesn’t look like this.”

“…this idea of how we can individually and collectively reenact or instead metabolize and recover from trauma in our bodies is most intriguing. How being a trans woman successfully walking body after your transition, finally being heralded for your femininity by your peers after being physically threatened, endangered, and brutalized by the outside world for not blending in might just be a type of bodily recovery from a lifetime of such trauma.”