Category: Quotes

True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end.

Moses […] forces his god to go with him, makes him into the exodus-light of his people […]

Where there is hope there is religion.

Ernst Bloch, cited

The temptation to continue May, without noticing that all the force of the originality of this revolution is to offer no prcedent, no foundation, not even for its own success, for it has made itself impossible as such, leaving only a trace that divides everything, sky and earth, like lightening. NOTHING WILL BE AS IT WAS. Thinking and writing, organising and disorganising: everything is posed in other terms, and not only are the problems new but the problematic itself has changed. In particular, all the problems of revolutionary struggle, and above all of class struggle, have taken a different form.

Blanchot, from Political Writings

My true book will appear only as an opus posthumum: I do not want to have to defend it or know about its 'influence' …

I will only truly speak after my death …, I place my entire life beneath the sign of that 'posthumousness'.

Rosenzweig, letters of 1916 and 1917 (i.e., before The Star), to Ehrenburg and Oppenheim. Cited.

For me, real objective life is impossible, unbearable…. So I transpose as I go along, without breaking my stride. I suppose it's more or less the world's pervasive illness we call poetry.

I am nothing more than an instrument of work…. Existence is much too heavy and monotonous to bear without constant artifice.

Celine, in letters (cited)

Kitano Gempo, abbot of Eihei temple, was ninety-two years old when he passed away in the year 1933. He endeavoured his whole life not to be attached to anything.

[…] When he was twenty-eight he studied Chinese calligraphy and poetry. He grew so skilful in these arts that his teacher praised him. Kitano mused: if I don't stop now, I'll be a poet, not a Zen teacher'. So he never wrote another poem.

Recounted here

As I worked in the factory, indistinguishable to all eyes, including my own, from the anonymous mass, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. Nothing separated me from it for I had really forgotten my past and I looked forward to no future, finding it difficult to imagine the possibility of surviving all the fatigue. What I went through marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression that there must be a mistake and that unfortunately the mistake will in all probability disappear. There I received the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron which the Romans put on the forehead of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave.

Simone Weil, in a letter (cited)

An abrupt question: Was Trakl a Christian? Yes, of course, at times he becomes Christian, among a general confusion of becomings – becoming an animal, becoming a virus, becoming inorganic – just as he was also an anti-christ, a poet, a pharmacist, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a psychotic, a leper, a suicide, an incestous cannibal, a necrophiliac, a rodent, a vampire, and a werewolf. Just as he became his sister, and also a hermaphrodite. 

Trakl's texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monotheism, just as they are sustained by narcotic fluidities, gnawed by rats, cratered by Russian artillery, charred and pitted by astronomical debris. Trakl was a Christian and an atheist and also a Satanist, when he wasn't simply undead, or in some other way inhuman. 

It is perhaps more precise to say that Trakl never existed, except as a battlefield, a resevoir of disease, the graveyard of a deconsecrated church, as something expiring from a massive cocaine overdose on the floor of a military hospital, cheated of lucidity by the searing onslaught of base difference. 

from Nick Land's Fanged Noumena

Aphorisms from vagrants, collected by the Plymouth based artist, Robert Lenkiewicz:

The Bishop:

I'm what they call the unwanted guest and that's the way I'm always going to be.

There are tributaries and estuaries and they go into the great deep sea there to be obliterated.

It takes a lunatic to find out what is really going on. You are now talking to a lunatic, sir!  A lunatic is someone who takes an interest in something no one else takes an interest in.  For the rest there is no escape.

The Singer:

If you're goin' to prepare yourself for life, why not prepare yourself for death? College may prepare you for a bit of life, but what about death?

Why shouldn't a man prepare his own death? I'll go out gracefully with the flowers. I'll even clip my toenails for the pathologist so that he can't look at me and say, "The dirty bastard!"

Without suffering, I'm lost: I wouldn't know what to do without suffering.

Now I live in a church as well, you know, God's church, the only real one there is, not an architects' one, a proper one. No painted stars on my ceiling, but real ones; none of them silly statues, but trees and bushes.

Some time back now I knocked on the door of this vicar an' I asked him for some food; do you know I could see him thinkin' twice on the matter. I says to him, "Do you believe in God?" "Of course I do!" he shouts. "Well then," I says, "come on the road with me.  I believe in him implicitly.  Go lock up your car an' come with me." Well, he nearly cut my head off with the slammin' of his door.

Black Sam:

I went to Moorhaven once – injections, pills and all that. I realised it was a load of rubbish. I sees this psychiatrist bloke, only a young 'un. I was weighing him up.  He was like me; he knew nothing.

A tinker give me this dog. I went to the north of Scotland with him; I loved that dog.  He lay on me 'ead in any barn. He died, though.  It didn't make any sense.

A handshake can judge you.

We're all strange people; we're all escapin'; we're all fanatics.

You searchin' for somethin', but what? If I could have had one spark, just one spark.  There's some force that governs.  Some gigantic force, but what does it govern?

Is there a God? That's what they say. Bah! Nature's the god. Force, that's all, force and more force.  The birds know it; that's why they sing.

Diogenes:

I knows I'm a bloody fool and there's some bloody fools don't know it.

Harmonica Jim:

If you want to know what's on this earth, then be careful what comes out of your mouth. There's beauty on the world and you can get beauty out of it.  The little voice is stupid; if you let that control you, then heaven help you.

You've got to make them understand you, not you them, otherwise they'll soon make shit out of you; they're very powerful people.

I get more from talking to myself than talking to most of the buggers round here.

You can walk through a graveyard and some of them that's buried there could have been you.

Come and visit me any time, the doors are always open, so are the windows.  There's no floors in my house, so watch it!

'Examine me'. - 'What is quicker than the wind?' – 'Thought'. -' What can cover the earth?' – 'Darkness'. – 'Who are more numerous, the living or the dead?' – 'The living, because the dead are no longer'. – 'Give me an example of space'. – 'My two hands as one'. – 'An example of grief'. – 'Ignorance'. – 'Of poison'. – 'Desire'. – 'An example of defeat'. – 'Victory'. – 'Which animal is the slyest?' – 'The one that man does not yet know'. – 'Which came first, day or night?' – 'Day, but it was only a day ahead'. – 'What is the cause of the world?' – 'Love'. – 'What is your opposite?' – 'Myself'. – 'What is madness?' – 'A forgotten way'. – 'And revolt? Why do men revolt?' – 'To find beauty, either in life or in death'. – 'What for each of us is inevitable?' – 'Happiness'. – 'And what is the greatest marvel?' – 'Each day, death strikes and we live as though we were immortal. This is what is the greatest marvel'.

Yudhishthira to the voice of Dharma, from Carriere's Mahabharata

KARNA: Flesh and blood rain from the sky. Bodiless voices cry in the night. Horses weep. One-legged, one-eyed monstrosities hop across the land. Birds perch on flags with fire in their beaks crying, 'Ripe! It's ripe'. A cow gives birth to an ass, a woman to a jackal. Newborn babies dance. Sons learn to be men between their mothers' thighs. Statues write with their weapons. Torches no longer give light. Cripples laugh. The different races merge. Vultures come to prayer. The setting sun is surrounded by disfigured corpses. Time will destroy the universe. I'm racked all night by my dreams. I dreamed of you, surrounded by bleeding entrails. I dreamed of Yudhisthira, radiant, mounted on a pile of bones, drinking from a golden goblet. I know from where victory will come.

From Carriere's The Mahabharata

In my first film I started from my social sensibility and I just wanted to change the world. Then I had to understand that problems are more complicated. Now I can just say it’s quite heavy and I don’t know what is coming, but I can see something that is very close – the end.

[…] The apocalypse is a huge event. But reality is not like that. In my film, the end of the world is very silent, very weak. So the end of the world comes as I see it coming in real life – slowly and quietly. Death is always the most terrible scene, and when you watch someone dying – an animal or a human – it’s always terrible, and the most terrible thing is that it looks like nothing happened.

Bela Tarr, interviewed, back with The Turin Horse

– Ms. Bachmann, you are a German-speaking writer living in Rome, that is to say surrounded by a foreign language. Doesn't it influence your literary work not to be speaking the language in which you write, and not even to have the language around you?

– […] No, that has absolutely no influence on my writing, nor does it bother me […] Granted, the people here are not any better than anywhere else, but after five minutes on the street the slight hint of impending insanity, the urge to give it all up for good, are suddenly averted. Granted, the people are a bit better looking and very friendly, but we all know what lies behind that. But do we really know what lies behind that? We don't know anything at all. For me, it's enough that the people aren't unfriendly, they're friendlier.

Ingeborg Bachmann, cited interview

While his career as a playwright reached its apex in Bochum, Bernhard spent much more time in Vienna[….] His newfound urbanity was reflected in his fiction. Like Bernhard himself, his narrators had grown up. They were adults, in their middle years. No longer hopelessly mired in the infectious squalor of Alpine decay, they became skilled survivors of terminal diseases. Like Bernhard, they know their time is limited. They tell their stories in one breath, before death can catch up with them. Their perspective, although they may live in the country, is urban. Narcissistically, they watch themselves perform their agonies of outraged estrangement and despairing quests for genius. Knowing their performances are matches with death, they enjoy the antics of the game. What makes them survive their genuine pain is their skill at sustaining the game at match point, as it were, the thrill of their own mastery. Not uncertain about the imminent outcome, they, like Bernhard, claim the classic fool's privileges. Their hyperbole is reality rendered from the margins of temporality. Performance is all – self-performance, that is, which includes the art of watching oneself perform and watching oneself watching oneself perform.

Gitta Honegger, Thomas Bernhard

Freedom has contracted to pure negativity, and what in the days of art nouveau was known as a beautiful death has shrunk to the wish to curtail the infinite abasement of living and the infinite torment of dying, in a world where there are far worse things to fear than death.

Adorno, from Minima Moralia

I don't believe in materialism, this consumer society, this capitalism, this monstrosity that goes on here…. I really do believe in something, and I call it 'a day will come'. And one day it will come. Well, it probably won't come, because they've always destroyed it for us, for so many thousands of years they've always destroyed it. It won't come and yet I believe in it. For if I can't believe in it, then I can't go on writing either.

Ingeborg Bachman, from an interview

Q. Don't you think that if you'd gotten drunk with Isabel Allende and Angeles Mastretta you'd have a different opinion of their books?

Bolano: I don't think so[….] even at my drunkest moments I never lost a certain basic clarity, a sense of style and rhythm, a horror of plagiarism, mediocrity, and silence.

Excerpt from an interview

I do not like meetings in real life. Foreheads knocking together. Two walls. You just cannot penetrate. A meeting should be an arch. Then the meeting is above. Foreheads tilted back!

Tsvetayeva, in a letter

Well, there is a higher order, but man can separate himself from it because he is free—which is what we have done. We have lost the sense of this higher order, and things will get worse and worse, culminating perhaps in a nuclear holocaust—the destruction predicted in the Apocalyptic texts. Only our apocalypse will be absurd and ridiculous because it will not be related to any transcendence. Modern man is a puppet, a jumping jack.

Ionesco, interviewed

What is sometimes characterised as a nostalgia for class politics of some older type is generally more likely to be simply a 'nostalgia' for politics tout court: given the way in which periods of intense politicisation and subsequent periods of depoliticisation and withdrawal are modelled on the great economic rhythms of the boom and bust of the business cycle, to describe this feeling as 'nostalgia' is about as adequate as to characterise the body's hunger, before dinner, as a 'nostalgia for food'.

Frederic Jameson, from Postmodernism

Salvation always comes from where nobody expects it, from the depraved, from the impossible.

Rosenstock-Huessy

Seen through the prism of depression, sanity is always bound up with self-regard.

Adam Phillips

… the last pages of The Brothers Karamazov: not only can I not read them without crying, I can’t even think of them without crying. That’s what I admire most in literature, its ability to make you weep. There are two compliments I really appreciate. “It made me weep,” and “I read it in one night. I couldn’t stop.”

Q. What do you think is the appeal of your work, in spite of its brutality? 

A. There are too many answers. The first is that it’s well written. Another is that you sense obscurely that it’s the truth. Then there’s a third one, which is my favorite: because it’s intense. There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you have to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you need to, energetically embrace excessive things.

Houellebecq, interviewed

I got the feeling that Godard doesn't believe in anything anymore; he just wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn't really believe in movies anymore, either.

Kael reviewing Slow Motion

Q.: Did you start writing to escape from solitude?

A.: No, because I wrote things that made me even more solitary.

Genet, interviewed

When I was a child, my grandfather told me that God dwells everywhere. 'In the trees as well?' – 'In the trees too', he replied. – 'In the animals too?' – 'In animals too.' – 'In man as well?' – 'Man,' replied Grandfather, 'is the partner of God.' – 'Man is God?' I was shocked. 'No. But he has a little of God in him.' This conversation has been etched in my memory. Grandfather was a believer – he believed with his whole heart and all his soul. That belief of his was expressed in every gesture: the way he gripped any object, opened or closed a book, picked up a child and placed him on his knees. Sometimes I feel I have inherited his religious feelings from him. I never learned much from abstract ideas; the figures from my childhood and the experiences in the Holocaust are what stand before my eyes and have molded my thoughts.

Appelfeld, from A Table of One's Own

I think joy is a lack of understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Tarkovsky

Day is falling, the fire is dying, and I'll soon have to stop writing, obliged by the cold to retract my hands. With the curtains drawn aside, I can make out the silence and the snow through the window panes. Under a low sky, this infinite silence weighs on me and frightens me. It lies heavy like the intangible presence of bodies laid out in death.

Bataille, The Impossible

Whoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country – his own – where he is not a prophet.

'Optimists write badly' (Valery). But pessimists do not write.

Blanchot

Painting is being alive. Through my painting, I beat back this world that stops us living and where we are in constant danger of being destroyed.

I did what I did in order to be able to breathe. There is no merit in that.

Bram Van Veldt