Stella Vu > Stella's Quotes

“I want to teach them what is understood by so few today, least of all by those preachers of pity: to share not suffering but joy.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“To design is to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.”
― Josef Albers

“Education is free. Freedoom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state”
― Karl Marx, Das Kapital

“When a boy… discovers that he is more given into introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather, it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.”
― Yukio Mishima

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'it's been an honor to serve my country.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“There were times he thought it would have been far better to never have known. Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong.”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

“So in the end maybe that’s the challenge: to look inside your own heart as perceptively and seriously as you can, and to make peace with what you find there. If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by looking within ourselves.” Takatsuki”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

“I wish there was a machine that could accurately measure sadness, and display it in numbers that you could record. And it would be great if that machine could fit in the palm of your hand. I think of this every time I measure the air in my tires.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hombres sin mujeres

“I've finally experienced what the poet felt. The deep sense of loss after you've met the woman you love, have made love, then said goodbye. Like you're suffocating. The same emotion hasn't changed at all in a thousand years.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hombres sin mujeres

“The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered.”
― Patti Smith, M Train: A Memoir

“Some things are not lost but sacrificed.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“Secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we're gone?”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.”
― Patti Smith, Woolgathering

“Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.”
― Patti Smith