Robert Kurvitz > Quotes

“There is nothing. Only warm, primordial blackness. Your conscience ferments in it — no larger than a single grain of malt. You don't have to do anything anymore. Ever. Never ever.

An inordinate amount of time passes. It is utterly void of struggle. No ex-wives are contained within it

[...] The song of death is sweet and endless... But what is this? Somewhere in the sore, bloated *man-meat* around you — a sensation!

[...] The limbed and headed machine of pain and undignified suffering is firing up again. It wants to walk the desert. Hurting. Longing. Dancing to disco music.”
― Robert Kurvitz

“Failure. Failure shapes the world. History is the story of failure; progress is the succession of failures. Development! says the futurist. Loss, states the rebel. Hangover! cries the moralist from the back row. Faliure: the rebel gets angry. Time is pale, he says. The failure of the Creator - an introduction to an era. Kras Mazov shoots himself in the head, and Abadanaiz, together with Dobreva, takes poison on the Ozonne Islands. Beneath the palms the wind blew the flesh from their bones into sand. Who could've known? All the good people in the world came together. Teachers, writers, migrant workers squatting in the trenches... young soldiers abandoned their battalions. What beautiful songs they sing! It seems to them that brave children are the favourites of history, as they wave white flags with a crown of silver horns.

And then, they lose.”
― Robert Kurvitz, Püha ja õudne lõhn

“The terrible noise of time approaches, the most violent sound in the world. There is no longer a golden light that falls on the room, but a very deep Pale. All the distances there are insurmountable, there is a horror vacui between every object and the next.”
― Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air

“Don’t do it. Just do something normal with your life. Go work first, go to a studio that’s already there, that’s already nice and produced. Don’t make your own studio. My second suggestion would be that if you absolutely, totally feel like you’re going to be a bum, that you’re not going to pay your rent and you’re going to lose your apartment and you have to do something, and then your friends happen to want to make a video game – as it was in my case – if it feels like an existential must and you will die if you don’t make it… then definitely do it, because it’s very much possible, I think. You have to be really… it has to be scary how much you want to do it, because it’s very hard.”
― Robert Kurvitz

“No peace. No truce with the furies.”
― Robert Kurvitz, Püha ja õudne lõhn

“I’ve never been too fond of that wing of materialism. Terrible if they were right. I love the world, every last atom of it. But if the world doesn’t love our idea anymore, you and Rodionov will be second best.”
― Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air

“See on see, kuhu nihilism viib. See ei ole enam see, mis võiks olla, või see, mis võiks mitte. See on. Kogu maailm on vahetu entroponeetilise katastroofi tsoon.”
― Robert Kurvitz, Püha ja õudne lõhn

“Communism is powerful! Believe in Communism, it’s a burst of enthusiasm! I promise! It’s beautiful when you believe in a person, but without it…!'

'Without it, there is nothing.'

'Nothing. It was a blizzard, but it was bright, it was morning. Communism is white, it sparkles! Communism is the morning, it is a jubilation!”
― Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air

“Technically the most impressive, however, is the story of the fall from grace of Ignus Nielsen – a prophet and Mazov’s schoolteacher. Despite being a noteworthy figure in the history of the communist movement, he became a disembodied spirit in the hands of the Vaasa censors. Mazov’s apocalyptic bloodthirsty character suddenly became somehow burdensome for the image of the social democratic Nordic countries. So they concocted Nielsen’s disappearance with Graad, following the newly defeated revolution. To the dismay of the censors, dozens of hours of film material were shot of Mazov during the technically advanced Eleven-Day Government, where the revolutionary icon was almost always accompanied by his best friend and comrade-in-arms, Nielsen. Destroying all the material would have raised suspicions. And so it was that an elliptical grey cytoplasm hovers permanently to Mazov’s right. It took historians decades to solve this eerie mystery.
Even today, many believe that the cytoplasm is Communism itself.”
― Robert Kurvitz

“We love the girls—yes, I dare say it—we love them more. Even this present moment, the evening city gliding past the taxi window, where the world is going wrong and time is out of joint, is a crime. This needs to be righted. To be solved. No peace. No truce with the furies!”
― Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air

“You could never quite say exactly what it is. Even when your eyes were rolled back and staring straight into your head, you couldn’t say. I give her to you to take, her smell in your hands, a sacred and terrible smell; now rub your face with her.”
― Robert Kurvitz, Püha ja õudne lõhn

“In the dark autumn evening sky above, masses of clouds
slowly sink into each other.”
― Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air