Walker > Walker's Quotes

“To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”
― Spinoza

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of a dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds”
― W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants

“The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.”
― William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded

“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.”
― Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision

“No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“The distracted person, too, can form habits.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Pessimism all along the line. Absolutely. Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in IG Farben and the peaceful perfecting of the air force. But what now? What next?”
― Walter Benjamin

“I, who called love my hope for love.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“A tyrant institutionalises stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“That 99 of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves that 99 of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them and then weirdly that if they stop to think about it that 100 of the things they spend 99 of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one’s mind. In short that 99 of the head’s thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties. Democracy is viewed as a luxury, only possible under conditions of relative affluence coupled with a strong middle-class presence to guarantee political stability. Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites.”
― David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

“If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“For me, this is exactly what's so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money -- and then tell us that it's only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“And so when you have lost everything, no more roads, no direction, no fixed signs, no ground, no thoughts able to resist other thoughts, when you are lost, beside yourself, and you continue getting lost, when you become the panicky movement of getting lost, then, that’s when, where you are unwoven weft, flesh that lets strangeness come through, defenseless being, without resistance, without batten, without skin, inundated with otherness, it’s in these breathless times that writings traverse you, songs of an unheard-of purity flow through you, addressed to no one, they well up, surge forth, from the throats of your unknown inhabitants, these are the cries that death and life hurl in their combat.”
― Hélène Cixous, "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays

“The only book that is worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed”
― Hélène Cixous

“The personal is theoretical.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”
― George L. Jackson