Brandon > Brandon's Quotes

“Given the freedom to create, everybody is creative. All of us have an innate, instinctive desire to change our environment, to put our original stamp on this world, to tell a story never told before. I’m absolutely thrilled at the moment of creativity – when suddenly I’ve synthesized my experiences, reality, and my imagination into something entirely new. But most people are too busy working on survival to find the opportunity to create. Fortunately, I’ve been freed by reputation, by the economics of success, and by emotional contentment to turn my ideas into reality. I’ve discovered that the more freedom I have to be creative, the more creative I become.”
― William Shatner, Up Till Now

“When we kill our desires we stink like any corpse.”
― Harold Norse, Carnivorous Saint Gay Poems, 1941-1976

“Even today, I've no idea what the truth is, or what I did with it.”
― Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh

“Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does...The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph...Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”
― Andre Breton, Nadja

“I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. Kennedy himself was 9/10ths the way around the clock or he wouldn't have accepted such an enervating and enfeebling job -- meaning President of the United States of America. How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher?”
― Charles Bukowski, Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963-1993

“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”
― Charles Bukowski

“In the old days, before I was married, or knew a lot of women, I would just pull down all the shades and go to bed for three or four days. I'd get up to shit. I'd eat a can of beans, go back to bed, just stay there for three or four days. Then I'd put on my clothes and I'd walk outside, and the sunlight was brilliant, and the sounds were great. I felt powerful, like a recharged battery. But you know the first bring-down? The first human face I saw on the sidewalk, I lost half my charge right there.”
― Charles Bukowski, Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963-1993

“To be sure, rock n' roll is usually a flagrant commercialization of rhythm & blues, but the music in many cases depends on materials that are so alien to the general middle-class, middle-brow American culture as to remain interesting. Many of the same kinds of cheap American dilutions that had disfigured popular swing have tended to disfigure the new music, but the source, the exciting and "vulgar" urban blues of the forties, is still sufficiently removed from the mainstream to be vital. For this reason, rock n' roll has not become as emotionally meaningless as commercial swing. It is sill raw enough to stand the dilution and in some cases, to even be made attractive by the very fact of its commercialization. Even its "alienation" remains conspicuous; it is often used to characterize white adolescents as "youthful offenders." (Rock n' roll also is popular with another "underprivileged" minority, e.g., Puerto Rican youths. There are now even quite popular rock n' roll songs, at least around New York, that have some of the lyrics in Spanish.) Rock n' roll is the blues form of the classes of Americans who lack the "sophistication" to be middle brows, or are too naïve to get in on the mainstream American taste; those who think that somehow Melachrino, Kostelanetz, etc., are too lifeless”
― Imamu Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth”
― Raoul Vaneigem

“He never liked me. So I never liked him. A long time ago I made a decision that made things a lot simpler for me: I wasn't going to like someone who didn't like me. If someone had a problem with me, I wouldn't argue with him or try to change his mind. If he demonstrated he didn't like me, I came to the conclusion that life was too short, so fuck him. This included quite a few people I ran across in the music business, as well as my own brother and the whole nation of France. I wasn't going to turn into Sally Field ("You like me! You really like me!"), but I wasn't going to waste my time with assholes, either.”
― Jerry Heller, Ruthless: A Memoir

“A network can be destroyed by noises that attack and transform it, if the codes in place are unable to normalize and repress them. Although the new order is not contained in the structure of the old, it is nonetheless not a product of chance. It is created by the substitution of new differences for the old differences. Noise is the source of these mutations in the structuring codes. For despite the death it contains, noise carries order within itself; it carries new information. This may seem strange. But noise does in fact create a meaning: first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination. The absence of meaning is in this case the presence of all meanings, absolute ambiguity, a construction outside meaning. The presence of noise makes sense, makes meaning. It makes possible the creation of a new order on another level of organization, of a new code in another network.”
― Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music

“Is it by chance that the 18th century of France, the century of the "philosophy of enlightenment," did not produce any poets except the Marquis de Sade, who -- despite his participation in the events of this epoch -- expressed the first violent protest against the essential postulates of this period?”
― Benjamin Péret, A Menagerie in Revolt: Selected Writings

“Sometimes the dolls of the Hopi Indians of New Mexico have heads which represent, schematically, a medieval castle. I shall try to enter that castle. There are no doors; the ramparts have the thickness of a thousand centuries. It is not in ruins, as you might think.”
― Benjamin Péret, A Menagerie in Revolt: Selected Writings

“Since I've started living out my dreams, since I've become the contemporary of the centuries to come, I no longer know death under the annihilating guise it has maintained in today's society. Only in my moments of deepest depression do I realise that in that world of swine into which I was born I shall be forced to die, just as out in the street I'm obliged to rub shoulders with priests and cops.”
― Ghérasim Luca, The Passive Vampire

“The streets were full of destruction and rubble, and this town I'd never liked, with its stupid people, stupid streets, and stupid houses, was now unrecognisable, now it had a truly unique beauty, and scantily-clad women traversed it like ghosts. A twelve-storey building in the city centre had totally collapsed. Caught up in her bed sheets, a woman who had fallen from the top floor found herself alive and alone on the pavement. Her husband had been thrown out of bed. From now on she would sleep forever, since reality was now as extraordinary as dreams.”
― Ghérasim Luca, The Passive Vampire

“The poet is rather one who inspires than one inspired.”
― Paul Éluard, Ralentir Travaux: Slow Under Construction

“Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it.”
― D. Harlan Wilson, The Kyoto Man

“Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.”
― Jeffrey McDaniel

“I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“jan was an excellent fuck...she had a tight pussy and she took it like it was a knife that was killing her.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“Misfortunes make us wise”
― Mary Norton, The Borrowers Afield

“For I must wander
On the deep sea bed
Showering pearls on dead men
Gathering shells
And sweeping the shadows of passing boats
With my falling hair
Across the sliding sands into the mouth of hell”
― Joyce Mansour, Torn Apart

“What a waste my life would be without all the beautiful mistakes I've made.”
― Alice Bag, Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story

“I have always been confused about how to touch another person.”
― Brandon Freels, Freels Comes Alive!

“Hate does not produce love, and by hate one cannot remake the world.”
― Errico Malatesta

“Impossibility never prevented anything from happening.”
― Errico Malatesta

“I’ve always felt there’s something genetically instilled and inbred in Californians—that California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realize deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want. It’s new, and they’re escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown. It’s a variation of what Freud called the “death instinct.”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.”
― Maurice Blanchot