Judith Schalansky > Quotes

“Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken,as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits--the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.”
― Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will

“Een geboorte of een huwelijk mag dan een belangrijke gebeurtenis zijn, maar het garandeert geen plaats in het geheugen.' De hersens, een zeef.
'Knoop dat in uw oren: niets is zeker. Zeker is niets.”
― Judith Schalansky, Der Hals der Giraffe

“Whether an island such as Easter Island can be considered remote is simply a matter of perspective. Those who live there, the Rapa Nui, call their homeland Te Pito Te Henua, 'the navel of the world'. Any point on the infinite globe of the Earth can become a centre.”
― Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will

“To search is more blessed than to find, Gissler thinks.”
― Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will

“Nichts ist befreiender als selbstgewählte Einsamkeit. (Alfred van Cleef nach J. Schalansky)”
― Judith Schalansky

“Naturalmente, il mappamondo corrisponde alla Terra più di quanto facciano le carte raccolte nell'atlante: nelle camerette dei ragazzini, inoltre, crea un'atmosfera piena di nostalgia dei paesi lontani. La sua sfericità, però, è tanto geniale quanto critica. La forma sospesa della Terra non ha margini, non conosce un sopra e un sotto, non ha un inizio né una fine e fa sì che un lato del globo rimanga sempre nascosto.”
― Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will

“Le carte geografiche sono astratte e allo stesso tempo concrete, e nonostante pretendano di essere oggettive, non offrono una riproduzione della realtà, bensì una sua ardita interpretazione.”
― Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will

“Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.”
― Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will

“For a long time, three dots in a row along the writing baseline designated something lost and unknown, then at some point also something unuttered and unutterable; no longer only something omitted or left out, but also something left open. Hence the three dots became a symbol that invites one to think the allusion to its conclusion, imagine that which is missing, a proxy for the inexpressible and the hushed-up, for the offensive and obscene, for the incriminating and speculative, for a particular version of the omitted: the truth.”
― Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

“L'isola remota è per sua natura una prigione circondata dalle monotone e insormontabili mura di un mare ostinatamente presente: lontana dalle rotte commerciali che, simili a cordoni ombelicali, uniscono le colonie di oltreoceano alla terra madre, l'isola è il luogo adatto per raccogliervi tutto ciò che è indesiderato, scartato e anomalo.”
― Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will

“No matter how many numbers and formulae describe the cosmos, no matter what knowledge illuminates its nature: as long as time still exists - and who could doubt it? - then every explanation
remains no more than storytelling, the familiar tale of attraction and repulsion, of beginning and ending, of coming into being and passing away, of chance and necessity. The universe is growing, expanding, forcing the galaxies apart; it is almost as if it were fleeing from the theories that attempt to capture it.”
― Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

“To forget everything is bad, certainly. Worse still is to forget nothing. After all, knowledge can only be gained by forgetting. If everything is stored indiscriminately, as it is in electronic data of memories, it loses its meaning and becomes a disorderly mass of useless information.”
― Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

“No matter how many numbers and formulae describe the cosmos, no matter what knowledge illuminates its nature: as long as time still exists - and who could doubt it? - then every explanation remains no more than storytelling, the familiar tale of attraction and repulsion, of beginning and ending, of coming into being and passing away, of chance and necessity. The universe is growing, expanding, forcing the galaxies apart; it is almost as if it were fleeing from the theories that attempt to capture it.”
― Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

“In the end, all that remains is simply whatever is left.”
― Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

“My gaze alighted on the pale-blue globe one last time. I soon found the location. Right there, to the South of the equator, between a few scattered islands, this perfect patch of land had stood, remote from the world, having forgotten everything it had ever known about it. The world, though, only grieves for what it knows, and has no inkling of what it lost with that tiny islet, even though, given the spherical form of the earth, this vanished dot could just as easily have been its navel, even if it was not the sturdy ropes of war and commerce that bound them one to the other, but the incomparably finer-spun thread of a dream. For myth is the highest of all realities and – so it struck me – the library the true theatre of world events.”
― Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

“The fragment, we know, is the infinite promise of Romanticism, the enduringly potent ideal of the modern age, and poetry, more than any other literary form, has come to be associated with the pregnant void, the blank space that breeds conjecture. The dots, like phantom limbs, seem intertwined with the words, testify to a lost hole. Intact, Sappho's poems would be as alien to us as the once gaudily painted classical sculptures.”
― Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

“There is no such thing as isolation. Even on Amsterdam Island, we are cogs in a huge wheel; here too, we receive signals that tell us who we are.”
― Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will

“By writing, as by reading, one can pick one's own ancestors and establish a second, intellectual hereditary line to rival conventional biological heritage... Writing cannot bring anything back, but it can enable everything to be experienced.”
― Judith Schalansky

“My guiding principles are: read everything that can be read. Put like with like, and keep everything you've read. Only write down facts, knowledge that can be verified. Wherever possible, keep phenomena separate from established rules and always start with the general and work towards the individual. Because what's on the outside always points to what's on the inside. You can deduce more about my essence from my room then from my lung or my heart. That's because the external an internal go together, just as the external sexual organs of the man and the internal ones of the woman are two variants of the same thing. And just as the garden is my domain, so the house will become yours. You'll see that sometimes the interior and exterior are out of balance. But in summer the shade of the chestnut trees and the findings of science can help with the heat, while in winter philosophy can help with the cold. Sometimes in winter I have to go outdoors to warm myself in the snow. A hot-water bottle can be a lifesaver. If you put it on the stove it saves you having to add hot water. I used to have a flat, curved metal water bottle to put by my feet. Nowadays I use a proper bottle and hold it to the sensitive place between my legs, as that's the best way to get the heat circulating.”
― Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

“The caesura of death is the point where legacy and memory begin, and the lament the source of every culture by which we seek to fill the now gaping void, the sudden silence with chants, prayers, and stories in which the absent one is brought back to life. Like a hollow mold, the experience of loss renders visible the contours of the thing mourned, and it is not uncommon for it to be transformed by the transfigurative light of sorrow into an object of desire...”
― Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

“A memory that retained everything would essentially retain nothing.”
― Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

“Ai margini dell'infinito globo terrestre non ci aspetta nessun giardino dell'Eden. Al contrario, gli uomini giunti qui da tanto lontano si trasformano nei mostri che loro stessi avevano scacciato dalle carte con un faticoso lavoro di esplorazione.”
― Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will