Untold Night and Day Quotes

“Ayami was her future self or her past self. And she was both, existing at the same time. In that other world, she was both the chicken and the old woman. That was the secret of night and day existing simultaneously. Ayami discovered this through a single movement, bending down to pick up the pebble. And, remembering this simultaneous existence more vividly than she remembered herself, became unable to remember anything else.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“In life there are wounds that like leprosy slowly eat away at the soul in solitude.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“Whatever the intention or aim of the photographer, every photograph is a unique proof of identify, firmly declaring that human beings are ghosts.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“The body is a passageway - a channel, without which the two of us would not be able to exist in the way we do now, the way I know you and you know me. Without their mirror images, our original forms would not exist.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“She headed straight to the heart of the darkness, which lacked even a single point of light, and where not even the road beneath her feet could be seen. Like a blind owl, she walked as one with the darkness, undisturbed by it.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“I escaped out of the pitch-black customs area, and in the darkness everybody merged with their bags and suitcases, fusing together like shadows worn thin; they looked like ghosts, passing through a station to the other world. Carrying backpacks and pushing trolleys, as though the weight and bulk of their luggage were a final, definitive record of who they had been in life, like a funeral guestbook.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“Objects, matter itself, were softly disintegrating. All identity became ambiguous, semi-opaque.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“Whatever the intention or aim of the photographer, Wolfi thought, every photograph is a unique proof of identity, firmly declaring that human beings are ghosts.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“In the darkness, Ayami's voice insisted overwhelmingly on its own identity. It was a corporeal voice. Just as, in the light of day, people can't help their gaze going to a beautiful woman, in the darkness they pay more attention to the voice. They accept the mystery of seeming to feel the other's gaze on their skin.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“In the past, people were vaguely fearful of photographs, believing the camera's exact reproduction of their own image would steal their souls. Not only did these images survive for much longer than their subjects, they were also endowed with an aura of magic the subjects lacked. A superstition, but one whose traces can still be felt today. People sense that the photograph captures an uncanny moment in the interstices of reality, enhancing reality's eeriness, the root of which is unknown, and fixing that moment in place like a death mask. Photography differs from the art of painting in that capturing or exposing such a moment happens neither at the will of the photographer nor the one who is photographed. What is photographed is a ghost moment, clothed in matter. Photography is the dream of comprehensive meaning. Each object has parts of itself that are invisible. This territory, which neither the photographer nor the subject can govern, constitutes the secret kept by the object. Unrelated to the intention of either photographer or subject, within the magic of photography dwells a still, quiet shock. Try to imagine our house one day when we ourselves are no more. Somewhere in that house is the ghost of us, which will pass alone in front of a blind mirror, revealing our own blurred image.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“Arrivava la notte. Ma il caldo non mostrava l'intenzione di indietreggiare. Di notte le fibre viscose che assicuravano la tenuta dei tessuti del corpo si allentavano, ondeggiando e poi roteando intorno ai margini della coscienza. Le cellule del sonno perdevano la loro identità, come se le loro password fossero state di colpo decriptate. Le loro membrane si disintegravano e sfumavano in uno stato ora comatoso, ora onirico.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“Le comete prendevano fuoco, i gas bruciavano e la cenere scusa impiastricciava la volta celeste. Poi, d'un tratto, la luce si spegneva. Arrivava la notte.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“The door swung back so suddenly it severed them from their shadows, which were left behind like dark ghosts.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day

“The former actress Ayami was sitting on the second flight of stairs in the studio with the guestbook in her hand.

Ayami stroked hie like that for a long time, as though the repetitive gesture might conjure a shamanic power—the only way of keeping together, in the same place and time, two human beings in the process of disintegrating.”
― Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day