Toby > Toby's Quotes

“I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.”
― Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

“Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“And so when the whole man will be outside himself, and happy for no reason except that he is so outside himself, he will enjoy some of the ineffable share in the supreme good which draws everything into itself.”
― Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly

“The work of memory collapses time.”
― Walter Benjamin

“To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.”
― Gerhard Richter

“Death is a funny thing. Not funny haha, like a Woody Allen movie, but funny strange, like a Woody Allen marriage.”
― Norm Macdonald, Based on a True Story

“Therefore, the places in which we have experienced day dreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all the time.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“But I don’t know how to capture what takes place except by living each thing that now and at the instant happens to me and it’s not important what. I let the horse gallop free, fiery from pure, noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day comes to an end I hear the crickets and I become full of thousands of tiny, clamouring birds. And each thing that happens to me I live here, taking note of it. Because I want to feel in my inquiring hands the living and trembling of what is today.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“The only advice i can offer to any thinking person is to kill himself before the millennium”
― Thomas Bernhard, Extinction

“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”
― Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

“Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.”
― Yohji Yamamoto

“I don't want your love unless you know i am repulsive,and love me even as you know it.”
― Georges Bataille

“My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away for my eyes restores me as a complete image for the unreal eye to which I deny all images. A complete image with reference to a world devoid of image which imagines me in the absence of any imaginable figure. The being of a nonbeing of which I am the infinitely small negation which it instigates as its profound harmony. In the night shall I become the universe?”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.”
― Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

“You believe in the crystal palace, eternally indestructible, that is, one at which you can never stick out your tongue furtively nor make a rude gesture, even with your fist hidden away. Well, perhaps I’m so afraid of this building precisely because it’s made of crystal and it’s eternally indestructible, and because it won’t be possible to stick one’s tongue out even furtively.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead