Christopher > Christopher's Quotes

“Lucien took the cigar and lit it, in the Spanish fashion, from that of the priest. "He is right," Lucien thought; "there is plenty of time to kill myself.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do.”
― Andy Warhol

“The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me--I have no others.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Concrete

“You too, you took an interest in the world. That was long ago. I want you to cast your mind back to then. The domain of the rules was no longer enough for you; you were unable to love any longer in the domain of the rules; so you had to enter into the domain of the struggle. I ask you to go back to that precise moment. It was long ago, no? Cast your mind back: the water was cold.
You are far from the edge, now. Oh yes! How far from the edge you are! You long believed in the existence of another shore; such is no longer the case. You go on swimming, though, and every movement you make brings you closer to drowning. You are suffocating, your lungs are on fire. The water seems colder and colder to you, more and more galling. You aren't that young anymore. Now you are going to die. Don't worry. I am here. I won't let you sink. Go on with your reading.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Whatever

“Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence

“Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Frost

“Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.”
― Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism

“In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists: And Other Essays

“However much an ideologue tries to bury [Lenin] beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing their on the plain of History and of our lives, in the eternal 'current situation.' He goes on talking, calmly or passionately. He goes on talking about something simple: his revolutionary practice, the practice of class struggle, about what makes it possible to act on history...not to demonstrate that revolutions are inevitable, but to make them in our unique present.”
― Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

“The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.”
― Georges Bataille

“Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.”
― Georges Bataille

“Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves.”
― Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater

“Not having anything around to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life itself, and that can lead you to take risks.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Platform

“You never so much want to be happy with a woman as when you know that you're ceasing to care for her.”
― Arthur Schnitzler

“Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.”
― Adam Phillips, Monogamy

“To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.”
― Adam Phillips, Equals

“The only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“The tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax.

Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of desire and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract?

Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration?”
― Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life

“Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

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

“When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise.
In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“So many writers make dope glamorous; a form of romantic transgression, or world-weariness, or poetic sensitivity, or hipness. Mainly it's the stuff of ritualistic communion among inarticulate bores.”
― Leonard Michaels

“May 20, '95 - Mississippi calls. She says, "All my working life I have done things to help black people. I can drive into the black part of town where no white person would dare to go. I have nothing to fear. They say, 'Hi there, Mizz Mississippi.' I still call them niggers, but only because of the way they act. I'd have an affair with Johnnie Cochran in a minute." Once she said to me, "I don't see why I should have to feel guilty about the Holocaust. It's not my fault." I hadn't been talking or thinking about the Holocaust, and hadn't told anyone to feel guilty. Her remark came out of nowhere. We were in a diner, about to have a sandwich and suddenly the moment was explosive. Simply being a Jew arouses a peculiar expectation mixed with resentment, even in a highly intelligent woman. Amazing to me is that she doesn't do much but watch television, drink beer, and smoke Marlboros, and yet seethes with dark thoughts and tumultuous feeling.”
― Leonard Michaels

“One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“That which others hear or read of, I felt and practised myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy