[One] is simultaneously both a victim and a viewer, who on the one hand surveys and evaluates the installation, and on the other, follows those associations, recollections which arise in him; he is overcome by the intense atmosphere of the total illusion.
— Ilya Kabakov; on the Total Installation
sqq. *
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: Accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
— Italo Calvino
Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market. Each person is a "package" in which several aspects of his exchange value are blended into one: His "personality", by which is meant those qualities which make him a good salesman of himself; his looks, education, income, and chance for success — each person strives to exchange this package for the best value obtainable. Even the function of going to a party, and of social intercourse in general, is to a large extent that of exchange. One is eager to meet the slightly higher-priced packages, in order to make contact and possibly a profitable exchange.
— Erich Fromm
Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then there are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the most. Of everything. They make you feel so alive that you'd follow them straight into hell, just to keep getting your fix.
— Karen Marie Moning
Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
— Albert Camus
Christo and Jean-Claude | Wrapped Trees | 1997/98
I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something absolute.
— Haruki Murakami
People often ask me questions that I cannot very well answer in words, and it makes me sad to think they are unable to hear the voice of my silence.
— Hazrat Inayat Khan
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Mirror, dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1975
I am more sensitive than other people. Things that other people would not notice awaken a distinct echo in me, and in such moments of lucidity, when I look at myself, I see that I am alone, all alone, all alone.
Sagen Sie jetzt nichts, Sophie Rois
I am free and that is why I am lost.
Ilya Kabakov, Münster, 1997
My love! You lie in the grass, your head thrown back; around you: Not a soul. You hear only the wind, and look up into the open sky — into the blue above, where the clouds float by — perhaps that is the loveliest thing that you have ever in your life done, and seen.
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Love without agenda.
Letter from Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer
When the wind stops, the silence comes back.
This is what I miss […] not something that's gone, but something that will never happen.
— Margaret Atwood
Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments. Only later do they become memorable by the scars they leave.
— La Jetée; dir. by Chris Marker in 1962
Ryoji Ikeda | test pattern [100m version] | 2013
Yves Klein | Monochromes | 1960
If we, today, are unable to read the entire universe and it's meaning off our civic institutions as the Romans did — loss or gain — we still need to be at home in it; to interiorise it; refashion it in our own image — each for himself this time.
— Aldo van Eyck
[…] keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. There is no other way. And there never was.
— Charles Bukowski
The only alternative to the spectacle is to show the alternative.
Rooms may owe their existence to an idea but, in the end, they consist of physical matter, of material that often obeys no idea at all and only wants to exercise its own rights.
You're empty but clever. Your half-lies are so refined that they look like truth.
— Through a Glass Darkly; dir. by Ingmar Bergman in 1961
Helmut Berger; 2014
I had the greatest difficulty in explaining to people that there is no hidden, coded meaning in the film, nothing beyond the desire to tell the truth. Often my assurances provoked incredulity and even disappointment. Some people evidently wanted more: They needed arcane symbols, secret meanings. They were not accustomed to the poetics of the cinema image.
— Andrei Tarkovsky; on Mirror
The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it — basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
