Blue Ruin Quotes

“The world was dominated by the interests of the rich and powerful. It was organized to lure you, to trick you into their service. An artist ought, I thought, to live like a spy, a spiritual fugitive. Art itself consisted of finding ways to say no, to become invisible to power.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“I understood, in a confused way, that what you can see of other people, what they let you see, is only the part of the iceberg that’s visible above the water. When I was young I thought of that as a challenge, a mystery to be explored. I would reflexively try to “get to know” everyone I met. Gradually, the purpose of this deep-sea diving began to seem less obvious. What is the point of knowing people, really? What does it achieve? We try and touch each other, but it is impossible.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood. I’d always had goals, even if they weren’t ones that other people could understand, but at some point I’d lost touch with the person who’d set them.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“DURING AN ARGUMENT, Alice once said to me that I mistook unhappiness for love. I pointed out that it was just as true of her. What we both craved was intensity, and ultimately it didn’t matter whether the charge was positive or negative, as long as there was energy in the system.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“Nothing was ruined, though everything had been lost.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“To twenty-something me, an artist was primarily someone who was trying not to get captured. The world was dominated by the interests of the rich and powerful. It was organized to lure you, to trick you into their service. An artist ought, I thought, to live like a spy, a spiritual fugitive. Art itself consisted of finding ways to say no, to become invisible to power. Only then could an artwork have any claim to authenticity.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“We exist in relation to each other. Maybe I was free in my mind, but it was the kind of freedom that would wilt when exposed to the world. There is, or was, an artistic tendency that purported to address this—artists would cook dinner in galleries, put on events, make various rudimentary simulations of community. I had no problem with that, but it seemed remedial, as if the point of art was to do some rather half-assed social repair. I needed to find out for myself what community actually was. It was a word that got used so much, but I didn’t understand it. I had no feeling for what it involved.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“It just seemed to me that being absent was more interesting than being present. Everyone I knew was obsessed with staying at the center of things, having attention drawn towards them, but there are objects—black holes, certain kinds of particle—that we can’t see directly. We know they’re there, because they bend light. We experience their effects, their traces. That’s how I wanted to be, to deform the artworld by my invisibility, the knowledge that I was elsewhere.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“Only in the system we have, where everyone is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self, is anonymity a kind of death. There are reasons for an artist to take credit for their work, mostly to do with money. Few of those reasons add anything to the experience of the art itself.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“The people whose names we carried didn’t exist anymore.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“Around that time I found an entry I’d made in a notebook: The only duty the artist has is to become more completely him or herself. I crossed that out and wrote: The only duty the artist has is to forget himself, to forget he ever existed.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“The only duty the artist has is to become more completely him or herself. I crossed that out and wrote: The only duty the artist has is to forget himself, to forget he ever existed.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“I realized that my work—and not just my work, everyone’s work, the work of all artists—was an alibi for the desire to put a frame around a certain part of life, to declare that inside the frame was art, and outside was not. The inside followed certain rules, was worthy of a certain kind of attention. I wondered what an art would look like that didn’t sit inside a frame, that bled out into life’s messiness and uncertainty. Art that didn’t have a border.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“He had a military rifle, an AR-15 or something similar, one of those sinister mass-shooter weapons that are marketed to American men like motorcycles or small-batch whiskey, signifiers of rugged individualism.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“What I really wanted was to disappear, to become nothing. I imagined scattering into dust, so that experience could pass through without touching me, like a comet traveling through the solar system.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“I found myself wondering, if countries could agree to remove their borders, what kind of existence did those borders have? They came into being every time an identity was checked, then disappeared again.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“I called it Unknown Masterpiece. For the duration of the show I stayed inside a sort of cell, a ten-by-ten cube containing a bed, food and water, basic sanitary facilities and painting materials. The cell was secure. The only way out was through a heavy door. When I went in, there was a certification procedure. I roped in the most authoritative figures I could find, including my tutor and a critic who wrote for one of the monthly art magazines. The certifiers sealed the door with an impressive-looking wax seal. Then I set to work. A camera was mounted inside the cell connected to a monitor in the gallery. It showed a view of me painting at an easel, positioned in such a way that the front of the canvas wasn’t visible. Everyone could confirm that I was working, but they couldn’t see what I was working on. Three days later, there was another ceremony. I took a Polaroid of my painting and passed the image out to the certifiers through a little hatch. No one but me had seen the painting, and only the certifiers saw the Polaroid. Once they had ascertained that a painting did in fact exist, signing their names to an absurdly formal document, they passed the Polaroid back to me. The feed to the monitor was disconnected and I set to work again, this time with knives and scissors, destroying both the painting and the Polaroid. I had planned on dissolving the shreds and fragments in acid, but the art school’s health and safety regulations made that impossible, so I settled for submerging them in a bucket of plaster of Paris. A painting had been made, but now it only existed in my memory, and in the testimony of people who had never seen the original, just a poor-quality reproduction. It was a refusal, a way to separate myself from all the other artists who were jostling at the money trough for a chance to dip their snouts. Instead of accumulation—of money, recognition, a “body of work,” it was deliberate wastefulness, a way to expend my creativity without hope of recompense.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“There are really only two kinds of artist. You’re either an intellectual or a savage, and you don’t really have a choice about which.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“So many years had passed. The dust oscillated in the sunlight. There was absolutely nothing to be done.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“I began to understand that we slip from one life to another without even realizing. There are breaks, moments of transition when we leave behind not just places or times, but whole forms of existence, worlds to which we can never return.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“I answered her questions as best I could, but I felt slow and clumsy, a rude peasant, lost in the enchanted wood.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“When I first met Alice, I wanted to devour her. I wanted to exhaust her and exhaust myself, wear us both out until there was nothing left. I understood, in a confused way, that what you can see of other people, what they let you see, is only the part of the iceberg that’s visible above the water. When I was young I thought of that as a challenge, a mystery to be explored. I would reflexively try to “get to know” everyone I met. Gradually, the purpose of this deep-sea diving began to seem less obvious. What is the point of knowing people, really? What does it achieve? We try and touch each other, but it is impossible.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“At the time, the breakup had felt as if it would leave a permanent scar, and maybe it had, certainly it deformed the months afterwards, even the years, but so many things happen in a life. There are so many losses.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“Silence can be a kind of courtesy, a pact not to put each other under pressure or extract anything but the most basic obligations.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“Going somewhere isn’t the point. The point is finding somewhere to stay.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“Only in the system we have, where everyone is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self, is anonymity a kind of death.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“There are really only two kinds of artist. You're either an intellectual or a savage, and you don't really have a choice about which.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“It just seemed to me that being absent was more interesting than being present.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“At some point on every big night out, we would put our faces close together and yell wordlessly at each other, as if to confirm that we were generating energy, living in the middle of the action.”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin

“Years later, long after the time when I knew Alice, when I was closer to the man delivering her groceries than the self-conscious boy at the restaurant table, I began to understand that we slip from one life to another without even realizing. There are breaks, moments of transition when we leave behind not just places or times, but whole forms of existence, worlds to which we can never return. It’s hard to picture myself in that restaurant,”
― Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin