"The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it."

- Robert Coover, Time Out (May 7th, 1986).

 

 

"You have to look outside to look inside."

- Robert Frank, Magnum photogapher.

 

 

"Anyone who isn't awed by the universe, they haven't any soul."

- Albert Einstein

 

 

"Solitude is fatal for any soul that fails to burn with a great passion."

- Nikos Katzansakis, Report to Grecco

 

 

"From my early childhood, before my bones, nerves, and veins were fully strengthened, I have always seen this vision in my soul, even to the present time, when I am more than seventy years old… The light that I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud that carries the sun… and I call it "the reflection of the living Light"… and I see, hear, and know all at once, and as if in an instant I learn what I know. But what I do not see, I do not know, for I am not educated, but I have simply been taught how to read. And what I write is what I see and hear in the vision… And the words in this vision are not like words uttered by the mouth of man, but like a shimmering flame, or a cloud floating in a clear sky."

- Hildegard von Bingen, Letter to Guibert of Bembloux (1175)

 

 

 

"You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats."

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grayl

 

 

"Even though man himself is mortal, he can imagine neither the end of space nor of time nor of history nor of a people, for he always lives in an illusory infinitude."

- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

 

 

 

"Behind everyone alive today stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, about a hundred billion human beings have walked on this planet... one day, we will know the truth about this incredible and wonderful universe around us and perhaps understand our own place in it."

- Arthur C. Clarke

 

 

 

 

"Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old want to be faithless, and cannot."

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

 

"The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer."

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

 

 

"I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume."

- Italo Calvino (1923-85), The Great Khan in Invisible Cities

 

 

 

"The supper, like most suppers in Paris, opened in silence, which was followed first by a confused babble and then by the repetition of a number of jokes, mostly rather insipid, some inaccurate gossip, some pointless discussions, a little politics, and a great deal of scandal. There was even some talk about books."

- Voltaire (1694 -1778), Candide

 

 

 

"Choose life. Chose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers... choose DIY and wondering who the f..k you are on a Sunday morning . Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, f..ked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future, Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?"

- Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (Englicized)

 

 

"What a tedious creature!", said Mme. de Parolignac. "'What pains he is at to tell you what everybody knows already, and how he labours some point that is scarcely worth making! How clumsily he picks the brains of others -- for he has none of his own -- and how me mangles what he has pilfered! The man makes me sick..."

- Voltaire (1694 -1778), Candide

 

 

 

"The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform."

- Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), Salon of 1859, sct. 3, in Curiosités Esthétiques

 

 

"Although I thought these signs accidental at first and did not pay attention, I was finally able, by blending the voice of the visible world and my hidden inner voices, to penetrate the primordial darkness beneath the mind, lift up the trap door, and see."

- Nikos Katzansakis, Report to Grecco

 

 

" DOMAIN: "...things will be practically without price. Every one will take as much as he wants. There'll be no poverty. Yes, there'll be unemployed. But, then, there won't be any employment. Everything will be done by living machines. The Robots will clothe and feed us. The Robots will make bricks and build houses for us. The Robots will keep our accounts and sweep our stairs. There'll be no employment, but everybody will be free from worry, and liberated from the degradation of labour. Everybody will live only to perfect himself."

HELENA: "Will he?"

ALQUIST: "...What you say sounds too much like paradise... there was something good in service and something great in humanity. ...there was some kind of virtue in toil and weariness."

BERMAN: "...Do you suppose that the manager controls the output? It's the demand that controls the output. The whole world wanted to have its Robots. Good Lord, we just rode along on this avalanche of demand, and kept chattering the while about-engineering, about the social problem, about progress, about lots of interesting things. As if that kind of gossip would somehow guide us aright [correct] on our rolling course. In the meanwhile, everything was being hurried along by its own weight, faster, faster, and faster. And every wretched, paltry niggling order added its bit to the avalanche. That's how it was, my lads."

- Karel Capek, R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots - 1923)

 

 

"To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours."

- Mark Twain (1835-1910), Joan of Arc

 

 

"...although no one else in the world remembers him now, he will live inside me as long as I live. We shall die together. This grandfather was the first to make me wish not to die so that the dead within me should not die. Since then, many departed dear ones have sunk, not into the grave, but into my memory, and I know now that as long as I live they shall live too."

- Nikos Katzansakis, Report to Grecco

 

 

"Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality," says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life."

- Nikos Katzansakis, Report to Grecco

 

 

"Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future."

- Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), America,"Utopia Achieved"

 

 

 

"The imagination is one of the most distinct and extraordinary gifts granted to human beings. We are aware of our other senses, such as sight, taste and hearing, and we are grateful for them. But we don't seem to know what immense possibilities are open to us through imagination. What is the function of dreaming? Where did it come from? Why do we have the ability to dream? And why must we dream? If it doesn't have a function in our life, then what is the reason for it?

"I have finally found a reason. When do we resort to dreaming? At times when we are unhappy with our circumstances. And how extraordinary it is that no dictatorship in the world can control it? No system or inquisition can control one's fantasies. They can throw you in jail, but you still have the ability to live your sentence outside the prison without anyone holding you there. Through the imagination, you can pass over the insumountable walls without leaving any trace of yourself, and you can always go back.

"Now the question is, once out, why go back? That has to do with the credibility of reality -- you have to go back and see what your reality is. In fact through dreaming, you have the opportunity to tolerate some of the unchangeable hardships of life. You get out, you dream, you are refreshed and you go back. Its like being in a stuffy room and opening a window. You let the air come in and then you breathe. In my mind, our dreams are windows in our lives and the significance of cinema is in its similarity to this window."

- Abbas Kiarostami, video interview following his film, Taste of Cherry (1998).

 

 

"In movies you don't try and photograph the reality; you try and photograph the photograph of the reality."

- Stanley Kubrick

 

 

"A great work must be novel without being far-fetched; frequently sublime, but always natural. The author must know the human heart, and how to make it speak; he must be a poet, without letting any of his characters speak like poets; and he must be a master of his language, using it purely and harmoniously and not letting the rhyme interfere with the sense.

Whoever fails to observe any one of these conditions, he concluded, though he may gain public applause with one or two plays, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors."

- Voltaire (1694 -1778), Candide

 

 

 

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."

- Italo Calvino, "Cybernetics and Ghosts," lecture, Nov. 1969

 

 

"The great artist looks beneath the flux of everyday reality and see eternal, unchanging symbols. Behind the spasmodic, frequently inconsistent activities of living men, he plainly distinguishes the great currents which sweep away the human soul. He takes ephemeral events and relocates them in an undying atmosphere. The great artists considers realistic representation a disfigurement and caricature of the eternal. This is why not only the sculptors but all the great artists of classical Greece, wishing to insure the perpetuation of every contemporary memorial to victory, relocated history in the elevated and symbolic atmosphere of myth. Instead of representing contemporary Greeks warring against the Persians, they gave us the Lapithae and centaurs. Behind the Lapithae and centaurs we discern two great, eternal adversaries: mind and beast, civilization and barbarism. Thus a historic event , occurring at a specific time, escaped time and bound itself to the entire race and that race's ancient visions. Last of all, it escaped the race and became an undying, panhuman memorial. By means of this symbolic ennoblement the Greek victories were thus elevated into those of all mankind."

- Nikos Katzansakis, Report to Grecco

 

 

 

"It is said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also."

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

 

"Every scene, really, has been done. Our job is always to do it just a little bit better."

- Stanley Kubrick

 

 

"...The same salamander can read, though only the evening papers. It is interested in the same things as the average Englishman and reacts to them in a similar manner, i.e. in the direction of established general views. Its intellectual life -- in so far as one may speak of any -- consists precisely of ideas and opinions current at the present time."

- Karel Capek, War With the Newts

 

 

"It is a mystery what the human memory chooses to preserve from all that is given it."

- Nikos Katzansakis, Report to Grecco

 

 

" 'Is one alive when other men are living?' Hidden within Goethe's question is the mystery of the writer's condition: By writing books, a man turns into a universe..., and it is precisely the nature of a universe to be unique. The existence of another universe threatens it in its very essence...

"Someone who writes books is either everything (a unique universe in himself and to all others) or nothing. And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, all of us who write books are nothing. We are unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and we wish the others dead...

"For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

"One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived."

- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

 

 

 

 "It seems that America does not produce anything other than the genre of collective autobiography. Americans appear to swarm unconsciously towards a large police (or psychiatrist's) interviewing room where they will confess their lives. Their very own, individual, unrepeatable, incomparable lives. The role of the discreet police in totalitarian systems has been taken over in the American democratic system by the indiscreet media. The bookshops are full of personal stories that describe the author (male or female) being raped, surviving incest or incurable disease, curing depression, dragging themselves out of the jaws of drug addiction, doing this and doing that...

"American television programs have become public collective confessionals: they compete as to who will confess more, better, more keenly. TV-confessionals are like gladiators arenas in which the fighters struggle with emotions, and the audience enjoys the fresh, authentic bloodletting. Confessions are sometimes produced like real Greek plays: relations, sisters, brothers and children are brought on to play out an authentic family melodrama before the viewers' eyes.

"Americans today make public confessions of their personal experience -- to order. What has gone wrong? And what has happened to the sacred American right to privacy?

"If you stare at an American's house for longer than three minutes (say, you like the garden) he has the right, according to one of many laws that sanction the sacred right to privacy, to send for the police. On the other hand, this same American will not deny himself the right to tell you his whole life's story at the first possible opportunity. If he holds back, the media will do it for him. Because the private is public! The private is political, so the feminists affirmed, and the political cannot possibly be private, so it must be public. It is not advisable in America today to shut the door of the office in which your are working. During consultations professors keep their doors wide open so as not to be accused of harassment. In lavatories you are only half concealed, and your neighbour in the next booth insists on a friendly chat thereby preventing you from having a personal pee. (And since when, I ask you, has an ordinary bodily function which we all carry out been private?) The right to personal illness has also been withdrawn. That is why Magic Johnson briefly informs the media as he emerges from the delivery room: It doesn' t! The whole of America knows what this "it doesn't" refers to. Johnson's newborn baby doesn't have AIDS. Even the right to a personal suicide has been withdrawn, as the very next day the media will make your tragic, fresh, personal corpse into a collective sociological theme.

"America today is writing its great collective autobiography. And when everyone writes there is general deafness and misunderstanding, as Kundera once wrote."

- Dubravka Ugresic, Have A Nice Day: From The Balkan War To The American Dream

 

 

"So, what does Europe mean in the Eastern European imagination? It is certainly not a question of geography, for in those terms we are already in it and need make no effort to reach it. It is something distant, something to be attained, to be deserved. It is also something expensive and fine: good clothes, the certain look and smell of its people. Europe is plenitude: food, cards, light, everything a kind of festival of colours, diversity, opulence, beauty. It represents freedom of expression. It is a promised land, a new Utopia, a lollipop. And through television, that Europe is right there, in your apartment, often in colours much too bright to be real."

- Slavenka Drakulic, Cafe Europa

 

 

[In the post-communist world of today], "...no one is getting rich by working. People think that there must be a trick to getting the money if only they could find out what it was, and they are right. The work ethic is non-existent anyway: no one ever got rich by working before, only by climbing up the party ladder, or pulling another kind of smart trick. In the experience of ordinary people, you work a little and get a little money. If you worked more, you would not get more money, so why bother? We have brought with us into our new system the mentality of forced labour: you work, but you get nothing out of your job; no promotion; satisfaction, pride, respect or money. So you do not invest your energy or hope in your job. On the contrary, you try to spare your energy, ideas and knowledge to use use elsewhere, if possible in a second job, preferably performed during the working hours of your first job. You act as subversively as you can, and at the end of it, you get a pittance. And the rewards are precisely the problem today, because now you have to work harder for the same pitiful $40 (the average monthly wage in, say, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria or Serbia). In these conditions it is impossible to develop a work ethic, to consider the quality of your performance or to treat equally those who have no money (the locals) and foreigners, who, in this context, still appear to be rich."

- Slavenka Drakulic, Cafe Europa

 

 

"I am genuinely upset at how the borders between honesty and dishonesty are being blurred, at how dependability is vanishing from the world, at how more and more people are becoming petty thieves without a trace of conscience. One Robin Hood is bearable, even worthy of immortality in legend. But a world in which a Robin Hood stands behind every second cash-register or in every second ticket-booth, a world in which such people serve us, convey us from place to place or entertain us -- such a world is scarcely bearable. Of course we have the option of behaving like gentlemen and ignoring them. The question is, will there be any gentlemen left in this world?"

- Ivan Klima, On Honesty

 

 

"Perhaps the difference between yesterday and today lies in the hope that history won't be for much longer a toy in the hands of a powerful few. When directly faced with the question of personal responsibility, a person cannot view history as a series of incomprehensible acts of a leader or a government. Eventually he must understand that it also depends on what he himself says and does..."

- Slavenka Drakulic, Cafe Europa

 

 

"A man who walks along the seashore brandishing a lantern in his outstretched hand may well be a madman. But on a night when the waves have led a ship astray, the same man is a savior. The planet we inhabit is a borderland between heaven and hell. No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad..."

- Milan Kundera, The Joke

 

 

"I sat in the corner of the garden restaurant over my empty plate, having eaten my schnitzel without realizing it, and I saw that I too (right now, already!) had been included in this inescapable and boundless forgetting. The waiter came, took my plate, stopped to brush a few crumbs off my tablecloth, and hurried to another table. I was seized with regret about this day, not only because it had been futile, but because not even its futility would remain, it would be forgotten along with this table, along with the fly buzzing around my head, along with the yellow pollen scattered on the tablecloth by the flowering linden, along with the slow, indifferent service that is so characteristic of the society I live in, even that society would be forgotten, and even its mistakes and errors and injustices that had hypnotized me, that I had suffered from, that I was consumed by, and that I had vainly attempted to redress, to punish, and to undo -- vainly, because what had happened had happened and could never be redressed.

"Yes, suddenly I saw it clearly: most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed. The task of obtaining redress (by vengeance or by forgiveness) will be taken over by forgetting. No one will redress the wrongs that have been done, but all wrongs will be forgotten."

Milan Kundera, The Joke

 

"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions."

- André Breton (1896-1966), Second Manifesto of Surrealism

 

 

"Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams - they all have different names, but they all contain water. Just as religions do - they all contain truths."

- Mohammad Ali, commenting on all faiths during visit to the WTC ruins in NYC on 21.09.2001

 

 

"Just because a great many people believe in something is no guarantee of its truth."

- M.Ghandi

 

 

"For my part, meeting innumerable others from all over the world and from every walk of life reminds me of our basic sameness as human beings. Indeed, the more I see of the world, the clearer it becomes that no matter what our situation, whether we are rich or poor, educated or not, of one race, gender, religion or another, we all desire to be happy and to avoid suffering...The desire or inclination to be happy and to avoid suffering knows no boundaries. It is in our nature."

- The Dalai Lama, Ancient Wisdom, Modern World: Ethics for the New Millenium