Koestenbaum Quotes & Sayings

I am demonstrating to you how tasty I think words are. I'm having sex with words in front of you. I'm playing around with them. I'm getting off. I'm trying to titillate you. There's this magical substance, language, that I'm laying out for you. Then you're going to fondle it. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Prose divides shame into stations. — Wayne Koestenbaum

I seek for myself the immunity of the diplomatic pouch. — Wayne Koestenbaum

People who achieve access to the deepest roots of their freedom can completely change. — Peter Koestenbaum

I mention Jackie mostly because I want to be assured that I inhabit the same universe as other people; that I am not alone on a distant shore. Jackie glues me to this world - most effectively when I can find a way to mention her name or her attributes, when I can find a pretext, however frail, to introduce her into a conversation, even at the risk of non sequitur, bathos, or incoherence. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Anxiety is the experience of growth itself. In any endeavor, how do you feel when you go from one stage to the next? The answer: You feel anxious. Anxiety that is denied makes us ill; anxiety that is fully confronted and fully lived through converts itself into joy, security, strength, centeredness, and character. The practical formula: Go where the pain is. — Peter Koestenbaum

The best leaders operate in four dimensions: vision, reality, ethics, and courage. — Peter Koestenbaum

To be a leader is to be awake and alert, to be dissatisfied at all times — Peter Koestenbaum

Whenever someone sorrows, I do not say, "forget it," or "it will pass," or "it could be worse" - all of which deny the integrity of the painful experience. But I say, to the contrary, "It is worse than you may allow yourself to think. Delve into the depth. Stay with the feeling. Think of it as a precious source of knowledge and guidance. Then and only then will you be ready to face it and be transformed in the process. — Peter Koestenbaum

Some people are more talented than others. Some are more educationally privileged than others. But we all have the capacity to be great. Greatness comes with recognizing that your potential is limited only by how you choose, how you use your freedom, how resolute you are, in short, by your attitude. And we are all free to choose our attitude. — Peter Koestenbaum

I was not thinking about the world. I was not thinking about history. I was thinking about my body's small, precise, limited, hungry movement forward into the future that seemed at every instant on the verge of being shut down. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Yes to fingerfucking the dialectic! Or to using the dialectic as a method of fingerfucking the binary! — Wayne Koestenbaum

Peter Koestenbaum also elaborated on the importance of others, particularly romantic lovers, in the existential context. Love is the choice to create and reflect each other mutually, verifying and illuminating each other's uniqueness because this is how we learn that we exist and who we are. A key theme of authentic love is resistance between, but welcoming of, two independent consciousness acting like positive and negative magnets within a single magnetic field. — Skye Cleary

The solitary operatic feast, the banquet for one, onanism through the ear: taking an evening out of my life to listen to Simon Boccanegra, I feel I am locked in the bathroom eating a quart of ice cream, that I have lost all my friends, that I am committing some violently antisocial act, like wearing lipstick to school. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Unless the distant goals of meaning, greatness, and destiny are addressed, we can't make an intelligent decision about what to do tomorrow morning
much less set strategy for a company or for a human life. Nothing is more practical than for people to deepen themselves. The more you understand the human condition, the more effective you are as a businessperson. Human depth makes business sense. — Peter Koestenbaum

Reflection doesn't take anything away from decisiveness, from being a person of action. In fact, it generates the inner toughness that you need to be an effective person of action - to be a leader. — Peter Koestenbaum

To recognize another's inwardness is to have seen the sacred. — Peter Koestenbaum

The world was doing its best to ignore the fact that I was a writer. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Listeners love when opera dethrones or kills language; the regicide, on these occasions, is the revolutionary, pleasure-seeking, penetrated, tickled ear. Opera theory tells us that words master music, but we, in our secret hearts, know music's superiority; and this destruction of language, this reversal of hierarchy, makes opera a fit object for the enthusiasms of sex-and-gender dissidents. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Half the urge to write is the premonition that later the thought I am having might disappear so I had better write it down while I still have the inclination, however overshadowed this desire is by indolence. — Wayne Koestenbaum

Creativity is harnessing universality and making it flow through your eyes. — Peter Koestenbaum

The greatest happiness in life is to be truly and consistently creative. — Peter Koestenbaum

The beauty and magnitude of a diva's voice resides, so the iconography suggests, in her deformity. Her voice is beautiful because she herself is not-and her ugliness is interpreted as a sign of moral and social deviance. Reading biographies of divas, I can't ignore the repeated references to physical flaws-for example, Benedetta Pisaroni's "features horribly disfigured by small-pox," prompting spectators to shut their eyes "so as to hear without being condemned to see." Audiences speculated that Maria Malibran was not anatomically a woman, but an androgyne or hermaphrodite-an aberrant physique to match her voice's magic power. — Wayne Koestenbaum