Andre > Andre's Quotes

“Why do we feel the need to disconnect in order to connect?”
― David Levithan, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

“Mankind, I suppose, is designed to run on - to be motivated by - temptation. If progress is a virtue then this is our greatest gift. (For what is curiosity if not intellectual temptation? And what progress is there without curiosity?) On the other hand, can you call such profound weakness a gift,or is it a design flaw? Is temptation itself at fault for man's woes, or it simply the lack of judgment in response to temptation? In other words, who is to blame? Mankind , or a bad designer? Because i can't help but think that if God had never told Adam and Eve to avoid the fruit of the tree of knowledged, that the human race would still be running around naked, dancing, in wonderment and blissfully naming and stuff between snacks, naps, and shags. By the same token, if Balthasar had passed that great ironclad door that first day without a word a warning, I might have never given it a second glance, and once again, much trouble could have been avoided. Am I to blame for what happened, or is it the author of temptation, God Hisownself?”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“People, generally, suck.”
― Christopher Moore, The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Convictions are prisons.”
― Friedrich Nietzche, The Birth of Tragedy/Seventy-five Aphorisms/The Anti-Christ

“Live dangerously.”
― Nietzche

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Books. Cats. Life is Good.”
― Edward Gorey

“Aquilo pertubava Bridei porque lhe parecia que só havia um mundo e que, se tinha defeitos, as pessoas não se deviam queixar deles, mas dar passos para o mudar”
― Juliet Marillier, The Dark Mirror

“O tempo faz com que deixe de haver diferenças entre a verdade e a mentira. Aquilo que aconteceu mistura-se com aquilo que eu quero que tenha acontecido e com aquilo que me contaram que aconteceu. A minha memória não é minha. A minha memória sou eu distorcido pelo tempo e misturado comigo próprio: com o meu medo, com a minha culpa, com o meu arrependimento.”
― José Luís Peixoto, Cemitério de Pianos

“All social groups groups make rules and attempt, at some times and under some circumstances, to enforce them. Social rules define situations and the kinds of behavior appropriate to them, specifying some actions as "right" and forbidding others as "wrong".”
― Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies In The Sociology Of Deviance

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“O que são quinze minutos senão uma convenção? Uma forma de medir, encaixar, prender ou dominar o que nos escapa, o que não compreendemos. Um ardil para nos tranquilizarmos, para não formularmos demasiadas perguntas...”
― Cristina Fernández Cubas, Con Agatha En Estambul

“A aposta na ignorância mesmo sabendo que eu também não ficava contente com a ignorância? Mas a ignorância, dizia-me, possui enormes virtudes. A de levar a atuar como se nada acontecesse. O ignorante é, á sua maneira, invencível. Nada se consegue contra um ignorante.”
― Cristina Fernández Cubas, Con Agatha En Estambul

“And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.”
― Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

“A vagina or a penis need not cause gender identity from the inside to be relevant in staging oneself as a woman or a man. The extent to which they are relevant depends on the scene. Out in the streets one does not need a penis to perform masculinity. But in communal showers at the swimming pool, it helps a lot. So there they are, the genitals: on stage.”
― Annemarie Mol

“So what I am trying to relate is not that there are two, five, or seventy variants of atherosclerosis, but that there is multiplicity. That as long as the practicalities of enacting a disease are kept unbracketed, out in the open, the varieties of "atherosclerosis" multiply.”
― Annemarie Mol

“The (serious) game played here makes a move that is the other way around: like (humans) subjects, (natural) objects are framed as parts of events that occur and plays that are staged. If an objects is real this is because it is part of a practice. It is a reality enacted.”
― Annemarie Mol

“There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.”
― Janet Frame

“It is unfeeling to speak of the people who cooperate in the production of art works as "personnel" or, worse yet, "support personnel", but that accurately reflects their importance in the conventional art world view. In that view, the person who does the "real work", making the choices that give the work its artistic importance and integrity, is the artist, who may be any of a number of people involved in its production, everyone else's job is to assist. I do not accept the view of the relative importance of the "personnel" involved that the term connotes, but i use it to emphasize that it is the common view in art worlds”
― Howard Becker

“You know, the sound of a 45 rpm record being played at 33 rpm. But as soon as I remembered that this is a CD and not vinyl, I could only marvel at the fact that these guys are so gol-darned HEAVY [author’s emphasis].”25 In an interview with the now-defunct influential extreme hardcore band Lärm, a band member recalls an incident in which the band’s definition of music collided with a sound engineer’s more mainstream ditto: “The sound check of our first concert ever was funny, the PA guy kept asking us when we were actually going to play a song…we already played three, we said.He shut down the PA and left…”
― Christopher J. Washburne, Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway.”
― Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

“It's not imitating anything; it has become a better version of itself.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Emperor's Soul

“People", Shai said, rising to fetch another seal, "by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It make us feel as if we're in control. Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. A man-made wall. The fingers of man's influence are all about, touching everything. Man-made rugs, man-made food. Every single thing in the city that we touch, see, feel, experience comes as the result of some person's influence.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Emperor's Soul

“What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

“But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if
evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows
disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the
shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings.
Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because
of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? You're stupid.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita