The only thing is to decide which is the most aesthetic form of suicide: Marriage and a 40-hour-a-week job, or a revolver.

— Albert Camus

Solaris, dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972

sqq. Cyanometer

All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.

— Haruki Murakami

sqq. *

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

— Anaïs Nin

sqq. *

sqq. *

We didn't say anything, because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.

— William Saroyan

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

— Susan Sontag

Stalker; dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

— Brian Eno

An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn't exist, for the artist doesn't live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn't look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

sqq. *

Quality of urban life has become a commodity, as has the city itself, in a world where consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major aspects of the urban political economy. The postmodernist penchant for encouraging the formation of market niches—in both consumer habits and cultural forms—surrounds the contemporary urban experience with an aura of freedom of choice, provided you have the money. Shopping malls, multiplexes and box stores proliferate, as do fast-food and artisanal market-places. We now have, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, "pacification by cappuccino". Even the incoherent, bland and monotonous suburban tract development that continues to dominate in many areas now gets its antidote in a "new urbanism" movement that touts the sale of community and boutique lifestyles to fulfill urban dreams. This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action, becomes the template for human socialization.

— David Harvey

sqq. *

Democracy is just a false idol — a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and dying civilizations.

— H. P. Lovecraft

sqq. *

It is better to be alone, she figures, than to be with someone who can't see who you are.

— Emily Jenkins

People often ask us: How is a picture born? A picture probably has its birth in the disorder within us, and that's the difficulty: Putting things in order.

— Michelangelo Antonioni

sqq. * / ** / ***

Projekt MIK, MIES 1:1

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.

— Alice Munro

sqq. *

The Seventh Seal; dir. by Ingmar Bergman in 1957

If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.

— Mo Willems