Guy Mankowski > Guy's Quotes

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#1

“You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”
― Octave Mirbeau

tags: civilization, life

7 likes

#2

“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.”
― J.G. Ballard

tags: imagination, immortality

1860 likes

#3

“You consider me for a moment, perhaps balancing the weight of your fear against the loneliness you will later feel in your room if you do not speak now”
― Guy Mankowski, Letters From Yelena

tags: ballet, dance

8 likes

#4

“She didn’t think that by hanging a chandelier from the ceiling you made a room with a chandelier. She felt you’d made another world, which you could slip in and out of by some vague process of application”
― Guy Mankowski, Letters From Yelena

tags: glamour, novel

5 likes

#7

“We act as a conduit for the observers’ unexpressed desires, the silent appreciation they may contain for anything; a lover, a river, a building even”
― Guy Mankowski

tags: ballet, dance, dancing

2 likes

#7

“There’s this misconception that artists should create their own mythologies, through how they live. Not true. They should create their own mythologies through their work. In whatever styles, textures and approaches they choose to use.”
― Guy Mankowski, How I Left the National Grid: A Post-Punk Novel

tags: artistry, artists

1 likes

#8

“I do wonder if the modern world creates these desperations for you. It makes you crave products you don’t want. It places its imperatives in front of religion, faith. It employs certain people for its cause. Celebrities, singers, musicians. When you conclude that the material world is disappointing you look to these figures for answers, as they sit just beyond the array. You hunt these figures down, like they are wise men. If they vanish from your life you imbue them as symbols with even greater potency. But really it is what you project onto them that’s interesting.”
― Guy Mankowski, How I Left the National Grid: A Post-Punk Novel

tags: celebrity, modern-life, religion

0 likes

#8

“Culture always tells you to look to illusions for answers. ‘Look at me’, it says, ‘I’ve worked it all out’. Celebrities grow too powerful because people mistake their colour for content. They allow them to create a hole at the heart of our culture, in which they then flourish.”
― Guy Mankowski, How I Left the National Grid: A Post-Punk Novel

tags: celebrity, culture, culture-critique

1 likes

#9

“It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

tags: life, loneliness, philosophy

718 likes

#10

“I remember the ecstasy of first going to a nightclub wearing eyeliner. Drenched in hairspray and glitter, dancing to Lou Reed records. I felt as if I was living on the outside, in a realm that most people could never enter. For so long I had felt completely alone, but makeup made my isolation feel special. The world came to life – the streets were no longer grey and cold, they sparkled with sordid possibility. But the most resonant pleasures in our lives are always individually defined. When you expect the world to appreciate them they simply expose their own bland uniformity. I learnt that the more unusual you are, the more personalised pleasures the world reveals to you.”
― Guy Mankowski, The Intimates

2 likes

#11

“Apathy's just a front. People offer it when there's something stronger hiding underneath. You have to work harder to tap into it, but then your performance has even more power.”
― Guy Mankowski, How I Left the National Grid: A Post-Punk Novel

tags: apathy, performance, post-punk, power

4 likes

#12

“We live in a world of many alarms, none of which sound our true concerns.”
― Guy Mankowski, An Honest Deceit

tags: life, modern-life

1 likes

#13

“Like other corrupt people, he would never realize that his punishment was in missing out on what he didn’t know he could have.”
― Guy Mankowski, An Honest Deceit

tags: corruption, justice, morality

0 likes

#14

“People never fully confront their wrongdoing. They are all trying to push for their own ends, and they lack the strength to truly apologise for that. In my heart of hearts, I wondered if I was just the same.”
― Guy Mankowski, An Honest Deceit

tags: morality, morals

0 likes

#15

“I understood then why people were so often defeated by this world. Perhaps the web of support that they required just did not come into alignment when it had to. Or perhaps our culture lacked the channels by which to offer this support.”
― Guy Mankowski, An Honest Deceit

tags: culture, life, survival

1 likes

#16

“All of the administrative methods used in professional circles- confidentiality, whatever else is in vogue- are just tools. Tools that governing bodies can deploy, under the guise of fairness. Some of the most corrupt organisations I have worked with have the most finely developed guidelines that they work to. These guidelines gives them more rope to hang their victims.”
― Guy Mankowski, An Honest Deceit

tags: corruption, institutions, politics, professionalism

1 likes

#17

“Something occurs to me, that you should let a man into your world on your own terms. And if you’re going to do that, then you should probably let people into your world on your own terms. And what better way to do that than through your art?”
― Guy Mankowski

tags: art-philosophy-of-life, life-lessons, love-quotes

1 likes

#18

“All I’ve ever wanted is to be frightening enough to get noticed.”
― Guy Mankowski

tags: life, life-lessons, life-quotes-and-sayings

0 likes

#19

“The truth is that there is no centre, no portal where all the decadence and glamour you craved opens up for you. There is just a lot of people standing about pretending they know where it is, pretending that they are part of its heart.”
― Guy Mankowski

tags: happiness, happiness-advice, life, life-and-living, life-quotes

0 likes

#20

“It all stings. Every humiliation just illuminates, like a row of promenade lights, all the other rejections and betrayals that snake into the darkness of your past. You only think that record deals, gigs and minor fame create a net that will hold your life because you are on the outside of the net. It doesn’t hold shit. All you have is what people are doing in the room with you now.”
― Guy Mankowski

tags: life-lessons, pain, painful-situation

0 likes

#21

“I asked myself, what makes up a human life? Are you not human if you lack a proper bed and a job and a purpose? Do you need someone saying they love you back, in order to be human? Do you need to see them every day? And if the answer to all these things was yes, then why had I never felt more human? And if not, then why did people insist that you needed all those things?”
― Guy Mankowski

tags: life, life-and-living, life-lessons, loneliness, pain, people

0 likes

#22

“I didn’t appreciate at that age the different way women loved, using their bodies and their heart and their spirit and their soul. I didn’t appreciate that they felt part of someone when they were in love with them. I promised myself I would never tell a woman I loved them unless I simply couldn’t bear not to. I told myself that relationships were not a game, no matter much everyone wants you to join in.”
― Guy Mankowski

tags: healing, heartbreak, love, love-loss, love-lost, pain, relationship, romance, sorrow

0 likes

#23

“Where does someone’s energy go when their body is cracked open? Does it end up in the corners of all the bedrooms they visited, nestled in the hearts of everyone they knew? Do they have their own secret portals through which they come in and out of the world, where we can sometimes feel them? And if they’re an artist, does their influence go even deeper, into places inside people that they didn’t even know they had?”
― Guy Mankowski

tags: death-and-dying, death-of-a-loved-one, death-quotations, death-quotes

1 likes

#24

“It occurred to me that so often in life, as we move around the stage set of this world, we feel as if we are trying to create a sense of truth about what we do. We use rituals and dates, and we imbue events with significance, all as part of our desperate attempt to make life feel real. But perhaps the only real is our private communion with a personal sense of meaning?”
― Guy Mankowski

tags: healing, life-and-living, life-lessons, life-philosophy, life-quotes-and-sayings, meaning, people

0 likes

#25

“I didn't appreciate at that age the different way women loved, using their bodies and their heart and their spirit and their soul. I didn't appreciate that they felt a part of someone when they were in love with them. I promised myself I would never tell a woman I loved them unless I simply couldn't bear not to. I told myself that relationships were not a game, no matter how much everyone wants you to join in.”
― Guy Mankowski, "Dead Rock Stars"

tags: relationship-quotes, relationships

0 likes

#26

“Adam replies two days later, when I have pretty much healed up over the whole thing. It seems like that is the way the world works. You never get what you want when you are most excited and capable. What you want comes eventually, dressed in its shabbiest state, when you don't even want it anymore.”
― Guy Mankowski, "Dead Rock Stars"

tags: life, life-lessons, life-philosphy, life-quotes

0 likes

#27

“Why would a diary be private unless it had power?”
― Guy Mankowski, "Dead Rock Stars"

tags: diary, diary-entry

0 likes

#28

“All I could hear in these stories about shitty people treating each other in shitty ways was an empty nihilism. Tear it down by all means, but then surely you had to build it back up? So many stories were Irvine Welsh rip-offs. He might've told us we could 'Choose Life'- and that meant consumerism, the other option being drugs. But beyond that binary there had to be something more- people wanting to heal, wanting to create something positive?”
― Guy Mankowski, You Complete the Masterpiece: A Novel

tags: healing, inter-generation, life, literature, millenials, millennial-authors, millennials-quotes, young-people

0 likes

#29

“When had art become something to enhance an experience, rather than the point of the whole experience? When had art become an accessory on the way towards a rich lifestyle, instead of being the goal itself?”
― Guy Mankowski, You Complete the Masterpiece: A Novel

tags: art, experience, life

0 likes

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