I Had Nowhere to Go Quotes

“I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade. The university lectures that I had found pretty impressive on first hearing, have faded away. Now I am listening to one on Pirandello. Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I’ve seen recently — they have already faded. Authors of thousands of books I’ve read... All that remains are the colours of their bindings, their covers. I don’t remember much about Beauty and the Beast, but I remember clearly, vividly the hear of the day as we were crossing the Rhine bridge, to see the film. Everything that I see, or red, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors. No, I am not a novelist. No precision of observation, detail. With me, everything is mood, mood, or else —simply nothingness.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Some day, years later, in our memories, we'll return back to these places, and we'll toss about and we won't be able to sleep, thinking, remembering...it will all come back and we won't be able to change anything...
So I wish that then, years later, you wouldn't regret anything and you wouldn't want to change anything at all - a life lived perfectly, a perfect memory...”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Kartais aš jaučiuos kaip šuva. Aš prisirišu prie kiekvienos vietos, kurioje aš pasilieku ilgiau negu vieną dieną. Numeskit, sakau, mane dykiausioj dykumoje, palikit mane joje. Grįžę po kelių dienų jūs rasite mane jau įleidusį į ją šaknis, į patį jos vidurį.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“I just sit. Or I walk and walk.
Or I stand somewhere looking at one spot.
And it seems to me as I stand here that I am totally disconnected from the rest of the world around me. Nothing, absolutely nothing connects me with it.
The world around me goes on being busy, conducts its wars, enslaves countries, kills people, tortures. The real world...
My life till now seems to have slipped through this real world without participating in it, without caring about it, without any connection to it. Even when I was in the very middle of it, I wasn't really there.
My only life connection is in these scribbles.
Here I stand, this moment, now, with my arms hanging down, the shoulders fallen, eyes on the floor, beginning my life from point zero.
I don't want to connect myself to this world.
I am searching for another world to which it would be worth connecting myself.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“How to live? To fall, to fall, with eyes closed, to fall into every occasion, into everything.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“A meeting with nature means to me sometimes more than meeting with a person. It wakes up feelings, memories. Its arrows shoot deep, always on target”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“People were rushing by, all hurrying to die”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“My life is as confusing as the mountains.
You can't get to the top of a mountain by walking straight. You walk through and around the fields, up and down, narrow passages, paths - the road that is ten times longer than the actual straight distance... And it always looks as if that peak, that summit is so near, maybe just minutes away - but you walk for three more hours, and you look up and the distance is still the same. The mountains upset the logic of lines, perspectives, time, space, distance. Everything's so different, in the mountains. So then, what about life?...”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Mes gyvenam ir atrodom, lyg gyventumėm nuolatiniam proteste prieš šio šimtmečio idiotizmą.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Ah, you realists! I am not ashamed of my romanticism.
Ah, you, abstractionists: I will confess to you my passion for objects, earth, nature.
Should I pretend I am a stone when emotions, memories surge and overflow me, and I am dreaming of home, and melting snow?”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Bet aš negaliu palikti nei vienos vietos be žaizdos savo prisiminimuose.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Namo ėjau pėsčias , žiūrėdamas, galvodamas. Aš stebėjausi savimi, kaip aš toks vienas galėjau išaugti, kad man visų šitų žmonių ir viso šito gyvenimo nereikia. Tačiau kartu taip skaudžiai ilgėjausi žmogaus. Nedaug - tik vieno, vieno vienintelio man užtektų.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Yesterday Leonas was telling me that he has never seen me in love yet. "Fall in love", he said.
I think I am always in love. Falling in and out of love, constantly. That's my trouble. Everytime I see a girl, my heart goes tuk-tuk-tuk.
Leonas says, that it is not normal. What kind of love is this! Nothing really!
Eh, what do we know about love? It's more difficult to love a woman like a flower than to love a woman like a woman, and rarer, too...
The love of flowers is the love of children and poets... Poets can love unseen subtleties that they glimpse here and there, that are missing in the world but which they want to bring back into the world...
One such quality is innocence.
Eh, they are like dreams, the young girls, they come and they go...”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Let us build our houses with our own hands. And grow the wheat, and bake the bread.
Then we'll know what the earth is.
Now, we turn the knob: the water runs. I have no idea from where or how.
Electricity...
We buy the bread: we don't know who bakes it, how, where.
The same with our lives now.
We live, but we don't know how, where, why.
And it has no taste.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“I am living with these pigs, with these horses and with these cows.
Every day I have to look at their blank eyes, their stupid bellies.
They call themselves by the names of various nationalities. As if that would make any difference!
Germans, French, Italians, Croatians, Russians, Poles, and other animals.
Thank you for the pleasure!
I love animals, but only real animals.
I love animals who do not pretend to be humans.
You should look, sometimes, into the eyes of real cows. They are serene, quiet, round. They are good, so good. Like medicine.
I like being with cows. I have spent much of my life with them. They do not know greed, they do not play politics. I love them.
Protect me from human beings!
Let me live with cows!
I'll live as a shepherd, if that's the only way.
You are driving me out of my mind, you, the Thinking Animals!”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Aš neabejoju
nei pradžia,
nei pabaiga.
Tiktai nežinau,
kur esu.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Muzika visados mane kankina, kaip gamta - jie plėšo mane, aš negaliu pernešti jų stiprumo.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Sometimes it's good to fall into emptiness. Be it another person, or oneself, or a junkyard...
Blessed are the hours of emptiness.
My life vacillates between the two, the emptiness and... and... whatever is the opposite of it.
Whatever it is, it isn't fullness...”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“I go for a long night walk, in order to get out of the factory day.
I walk and i wander through the network of the streets, neon lights and night crowds.
This woman on the corner, she was shouting at me: ''Ay, why are you so sad?''
Lady of the night, you haven't see me really sad.
Right now i am in my happiest mood.
I continue walking. How could she really understand the depths of my sadness.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Reason? When you touch a ball charged with electricity, does the electricity have a reason to discharge itself? Or an apple, to grow, to ripen, to fall? Or to do good to a child? Or to be a mother? To love? To create?
The best things have no need, no reason, they happen, the same as when you release an object and it falls.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Today it's snowing, so beautifully, all white! And only yesterday I was very sad, I thought there won't be any winter this year. I can't imagine a winter without snow. Can a Lithuanian live without snow? Could a Lithuanian ever live only with green and brown and red? In Brazil, or Australia? Oh, my God, how would that be possible, without snow, without ice flowers on the windows, without the biting cold? You look at those white distances and something wakes up in you, something so close to you... Or when you listen to the wind banging outside, how it spills on the window glass with thin cold icy snow flakes. You put your forehead against the night window and you stare into the dark and see the snow fall, and hear a soft thumping of feet in the street below.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“We try to hide it every way we can, but it always comes out, the lyricism. A Lithuanian connot live without nature. You can't detach him from the wide, green fields, from the brooks, the snow, the cobwebs flying through the air in late September, or from his forests, fragrant with moss and beries.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“You want me to be rational. The most rational thing is the machine. Go to the machines. All their separate parts work together. But I live with no purpose, irrationally.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“<...>What a hell am I doing here? Why do I need a degree? I haven't heard a single sentence during all these lectures that would inspire one single line of poetry.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“It's more difficult for a mother to forget one child than for living humanity to forget all the millions who died in this war.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“We have learned to eat like snakes. When there is something to eat - we eat enough to last for a week. When there is nothing - we don't eat. Now, when we get our food supply, we eat it all, right there, we leave nothing for tomorrow. Like the birds. And then we read our books. We go after spiritual food...”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“All nature is full of hatred for humans. I don't think man has any friends among plants or animals. I suspect that even dogs and cats, those so-called best friends of man, are only pretending friendship to man in order to spy on his misdeeds, and they would betray him without blinking an eye the first chance they had. They know that Man is the worst of the beasts.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Long lines of birds are flying over the city.
Freedom in their wings.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Isn't it a little bit pretentious to try to predict the future while basing these predictions on some present act? If a certain act had a cause to begin, it doesn't mean that that act will be a cause of some other act or event... There are empty lives and empty hearts.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Smithshops. They have always attracted me. A smithshop is like the mind of an artist. Every corner filled with junk. Soot, hammers, wheels, nails, iron shavings, everything in one massive pile, and in the middle of it all, and in perfect control, stands the smith himself. His hands, his eyes pick out what is needed. He will pick out an item from the chaos where everything looks so totally useless and make something new out of it.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go