Rolanda > Rolanda's Quotes

“Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.”
― Martin Heidegger

“only he who already understands can listen”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein, only slightly in those who are jittery, imperceptibly in the 'Oh, yes' and the 'Oh, no' of men of affairs; but most readily in the reserved, and most assuredly in those who are basically daring. But those daring ones sustained by that on which they expend themselves—in order thus to preserve the ultimate grandeur of existence.”
― Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings

“When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it transmits is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial "sources" from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.”
― Paul Auster, Oracle Night

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.”
― Susan Sontag

“I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all”
― Susan Sontag

“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world."

[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]”
― Susan Sontag

“Mad people = People who stand alone and burn.
I'm attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.”
― Susan Sontag

“I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all. I like watching people, but I don’t like talking to them, dealing with them, pleasing them, or offending them. I am tired.”
― Susan Sontag, I, etcetera

“I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.”
― Susan Sontag