calling out of context

"Of course it is a pity that so much of all creative work is so closely related to the personality of the one who does it.
It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive that those emotions that stir him deeply enough to demand expression, and to charge their expression with some measure of light and power, are nearly all rooted, however changed by their surface, in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself, that special world, the passions and images of it that each of us weaves about him from birth to death, a web of monstrous complexity, spun forth at a speed that is incalculable to a length beyong measure, from the spider mouth of his own singluar perceptions.
It is a lonely idea, a lonely condition, so terrifying to think of that we usually don't. And so we talk to each other, write and wire each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls to each other. As a character in a play once said, 'We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.'" - Tennessee Williams

'Tell me,' I said at last, 'is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark?'
'Think,' said Jacques 'of the men who have kneeled before you while you thought of something else and pretended nothing was happening down there in the dark between your legs.'
I stared at the amber cognac and at the wet rings on the metal. Deep below, trapped in the metal, the outline of my own face looked upward hopelessly at me.
'You think,' he persisted, ' that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are.
But you should ask yourself why they are.'
'Why are they - shameful?' I asked him.
'Because there is no affection in them, and no joy. It's like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.'
I asked him: 'Why?'
'That you must ask yourself,' he told me, 'and perhaps one day this morning will not be ashes in your mouth.'
-Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin