Erik Tuban > Erik's Quotes

“The Hero Path

We have not even to risk the adventure alone
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known ...
we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.

And where we had thought to slay another
we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone
we shall be with all the world.”
― Joseph Campbell

“I want to be violated by insight.”
― Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”
― Tristan Tzara

“Franz Kafka is Dead

He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. They put their arms around each other, and touched their children's hair. They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark tree. Then they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees , Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind.

That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice. One child, the smallest, shrieked out in delight and her cry tore through the silence and exploded the ice of a giant oak tree. The world shone.

They found him frozen on the ground like a bird. It's said that when they put their ears to the shell of his ears, they could hear themselves.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“If I were dead and buried And I heard your voice, Beneath the sod My heart of dust Would still rejoice.”
― Dalton Trumbo

“Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it

--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“The four cardinal points are three: South and North.”
― Vicente Huidobro, Altazor

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.”
― Wisława Szymborska, Nothing Twice: Selected Poems / Nic dwa razy: Wybór wierszy

“I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other.”
― Wislawa Szymborska

“my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom”
― Jacques Lacan

“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

”
― Jacques Lacan

“Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. ”
― Guy Debord

“Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.”
― John Cage

“When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire

“If Americans thought music and art belonged together, they wouldn't have the Grammys.”
― Kristin Hersh, Rat Girl

“We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.”
― Emma Goldman

“The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away ...
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away traces of our own age ...”
― Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings

“A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“I am no man, I am dynamite.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

“There is always something left to love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?”
― Lin Yutang

“Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance. ”
― Roland Barthes

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“In the summer
I stretch out on the shore
And think of you. Had I told the sea
What I felt for you,
It would have left its shores,
Its shells,
Its fish,
And followed me.”
― Nizar Qabbani

“Science has eliminated distance,” Melquíades proclaimed. “In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude