Pixel Flesh Quotes

As time passes, the cast and crew go the way of all flesh, though their celluloid echoes remain--walking, talking, fighting, fucking. After enough time, every person you see onscreen will have died, transformed through the magic of cinema into a collection of visible memories: light on a screen, pixels on a videotape, information on a DVD. We bring them back every time we start a movie, and they live again, reflected in our eyes. It's a cruel sort of immortality, I guess, though it probably beats the alternative.

We invited each other into our spaces when parents would allow – girls only in these altars of beauty. We were christened into girlhood, not by holy water or the consumption of Christ’s body and blood, but with these rituals – painting each other’s faces, playing with each other’s hair, making each other over, doing our worst because we were allowed and laughing until we lost all control of our limbs, collapsing in a heavy pile of happy tears. There was an intimacy that was so pure, as deep as if we were real sisters. Our lips frosted with sugar, giggling under duvets, talking about kisses and crushes and trying our hardest not to fall asleep – fighting to keep the night alive.

SUPER KITTY GAS BOMB!” Jack yelled, throwing Bruce at the Great Gourd. The evoker ducked, and Bruce flew right over his head.  “HAHAHeheheh! YOU MISSED, FOOL!” the evoker yelled. “Your one big play and you MISSED!” Jack smirked. “I wasn’t aiming for you.”  The evoker spun around to witness a horrible sight. The rotten flesh had finally had its effect on Bruce, and the cat’s eyes crossed as he let out the hugest, nastiest, greenest fart he had ever had.

Bruce grabbed the rotten flesh with his teeth, tossed it into the air, then snatched it up and gobbled the whole thing down happily, his tail swishing. He didn’t look back at Mom as he began cleaning his paws.  “Darn cat!” Mom yelled. Chapter 5 Mom’s yelling had woken up the entire village and everyone came out of their homes, yawns on their faces. “KITTY!” Elijah shouted

Some theologies say it is not an individual but a collective people who bear the image of God. I quite like this, because it means we need a diversity of people to reflect God more fully. Anything less and the image becomes pixelated and grainy, still beautiful but lacking clarity. If God really is three parts in one like they say, it means that God's wholeness is in a multitude. I do not know if God meant to confer value on us by creating us in their own image, but they had to have known it would at least be one outcome. How can anyone who is made to bear likeness to the maker of the cosmos be anything less than glory? This is inherent dignity. I do find it peculiar that humans have come to wield this over the rest of creation as though we are somehow superior. I don't believe this to be the case. Sometimes I wonder if we knelt down and put our ear to the ground, it would whisper up to us, Yes, you were made in the image of God, but God made you of me. We've grown numb to the idea that we ourselves are made of the dust, mysteriously connected to the goodness of the creation that surrounds us. Perhaps the more superior we believe ourselves to be to creation, the less like God we become. But if we embrace shalom—the idea that everything is suspended in a delicate balance between the atoms that make me and the tree and the bird and the sky—if we embrace the beauty of all creation, we find our own beauty magnified. And what is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos?

No Bruce!” Mom yelled, but it was too late. “Gross!” Mom said. “Stop eating rotten flesh! It’s literally called ‘rotten flesh!

You look amazing for twenty-eight!’ I wondered what they thought happened when you dared to hit twenty-five – that your face fell off, your muscles melted, you disappeared into thin air, ceased to exist, to mean anything at all?

The digital realm is itself a fountain of youth – there are always young, fresh people to follow online, elevated by the algorithm and pushed to visibility.

Preventative Botox doesn’t exist, it’s just Botox, and it’s wildly misleading,’ says Charlotte. ‘Even if you get Botox your entire life, as soon as you stop, you’d start frowning again, and the lines would start showing. And that isn’t a fucking bad thing!

Whether it’s tanning or lightening your skin, buying more products, investing in risky procedures, concealing some features and emphasising others. Something must always be changed or maintained or sustained in order for us to uphold the most vital of virtues.

The word ‘empowered’ was everywhere once more and it started to lose all meaning as it was co-opted and sold to those who needed it least. The celebrities who profited from ‘empowering’ naked selfies were actually already in possession of a great deal of power – including pretty privilege.

South Asian women must remove all body hair whilst the hair on their head is coveted.

Getting to know your body, what brings you joy and makes you feel comfortable and confident is your greatest sexual power, not learning how to push your feelings aside in favour of somebody else’s pleasure.

Her profiles are awash with high-flash images and designer shopping bags, expensive interiors and nightclub toilets. You would never guess she is broke, that the carrier bags are empty, that she buys expensive makeup to use once a month and the rest of the time is frugal with her routine.

It is convenient to play down the significance of beauty in our lives, to mark it as frivolous and trivial, denying its entrenchment in our social, cultural and economic standing.

The archetypal exaggerated beauty of reality TV may hold currency on social media, in sex work and on shows such as Love Island but can often be a penalising factor in applications for blue-collar jobs in more ‘professional’ offline industries.

The “cyborg question” around the Kardashians causes us to question whether it empowers women – are we more bionic with these additions to our beauty arsenals? Or do they fragment us into bits and pieces?

Both a rallying cry and a refusal to suffer in silence, this is the defining book on what it feels like to exist as a woman today.

The majority of us perform every day, by applying makeup, wearing high heels or apologising! profusely! as a form of subservience. The performance exists on a sliding scale – from applying lipstick to injecting your lips, from dieting to achieve a smaller waist to undergoing intense plastic surgery to create an hourglass shape.

The curators of old have simply been replaced by tech bros who decide who gets to be on display and who gets ostracised.

To be a woman is to exist in a changeling body, always on the brink of transformation.

Much like Sylvia's Plath's famous line in The Bell Jar, as Esther tries to reassure herself of her place in the world - 'I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am' - the fervour with which we create content, capture ourselves, our rooms, our outfits, our possessions, and the ardour with which we turn ourselves inside out in the digital realm feels like a repeated reassurance: I was here, I was here, I was here.

Ellie gave him a frustrated look. “What if they shoot out like a noxious gas or something?” “Like a cat after it’s eaten rotten flesh?” Ridge asked.

When Audre Lorde wrote that oft-instagrammed quote: 'Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,' she didn't mean that self-care should be selfish or a form of self-flagellation, that it should be an overpriced moisturizer or a painful procedure. Self-care, in reality, is supposed to coincide with community care. It means taking time for yourself so that you can better support those around you - resting so that you can be a part of the revolution, helping other women with child-care, prepping meals for those in need or providing a voice for the voiceless. We, as women, win and lose together. Sorority is self-care.