Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.

— Ernest Hemingway

Sensuality has been known to overcome even the most rational of buildings. [...] Architecture is the ultimate erotic act. Carry it to excess and it will reveal both the traces of reason and the sensual experience of space. Simultaneously.

— Bernard Tschumi

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at work ...

She felt that she wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding.

— Virginia Woolf

When I see a film and I like it, I want to share my enthusiasm for it with others. There is so little in this modern commercial world that is really and truly exciting. That it's very important for me that those little fragments of beauty, of paradise, are brought to the attention of friends and strangers equally.

— Jonas Mekas

Donatas Banionis

* 28.04.1924 - † 04.09.2014

You mean more to me than any scientific truth.

— Kris Kelvin; in Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972

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And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: Which is better — cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.

— Jane Austen

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

— Gabriel García Márquez;

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Yohji Yamamoto; Paris, 1991

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Everything depends on how near you sleep to me.

— Leonard Cohen

Ein erstaunliches Mischwesen aus Metal und Progressive […] Sunn O))) […] haben ihre Palette durch Streicher, Hörner und Chöre ergänzt — was eine zutiefst progressive Geste ist. Sie erforschen hier Jazz, Klassik und Kammermusik.

— Steven Wilson

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Every time I use my instincts, I win. Every time I think too much, I lose.

— Alber Elbaz

Otto Sander | Nick Cave

Der Himmel über Berlin, dir. by Wim Wenders in 1987

The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that's not the one. When you meet your soul mate you'll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation.

— Monica Drake

We are not a set of private meanings that we can choose or not choose to make public to others. We are the sum of our visible gestures. We are as available to others as to ourselves. Our gestures are themselves formed by the public world, by its conventions, its language, the repertory of its emotions, from which we learn our own. It is no accident that the work of Morris and Serra was being made at the time when novelists in France were declaring, "I do not write. I am written".

— Rosalind E. Krauss

[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

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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.

— Henri Barbusse

Sagen Sie jetzt nichts, Sophie Rois

I am free and that is why I am lost.

— Franz Kafka

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.

Looking up, reading the words ...

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

— Frank O'Hara

Love without agenda.

Letter from Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer

When the wind stops, the silence comes back.

— Raúl Zurita

This is what I miss […] not something that's gone, but something that will never happen.

— Margaret Atwood