Jadene > Jadene's Quotes

“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
― Søren Kierkegaard , The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

“for the existentialists, what generated anxiety was not the godlessness of the world, per se, but rather the freedom to choose between God and godlessness. Though freedom is something we actively seek, the freedom to choose generates anxiety. “When I behold my possibilities,” Kierkegaard wrote, “I experience that dread which is the dizziness of freedom, and my choice is made in fear and trembling.” Many people try to flee anxiety by fleeing choice. This helps explain the perverse-seeming appeal of authoritarian societies—the certainties of a rigid, choiceless society can be very reassuring—and why times of upheaval so often produce extremist leaders and movements: Hitler in Weimar Germany, Father Coughlin in Depression-era America, or Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Vladimir Putin in Russia today. But running from anxiety, Kierkegaard believed, was a mistake because anxiety was a “school” that taught people to come to terms with the human condition.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“We are all born mad. Some remain so.”
― Samuel Beckett

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.”
― Samuel Beckett

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“I can't go on, I'll go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

“Je suis comme ça. Ou j'oublie tout de suite ou je n'oublie jamais."

Samuel BECKETT, En attendant Godot

I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget. ”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus

“They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

“…is postmodernity the pastime of an old man who scrounges in the garbage-heap of finality looking for leftovers, who brandishes unconsciousnesses, lapses, limits, confines, goulags, parataxes, non-senses, or paradoxes, and who turns this into the glory of his novelty, into his promise of change?”
― Jean-François Lyotard

“I shall call modern that art which ... presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.”
― Jean-François Lyotard

“... In the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

“... Desire baffles knowledge and power.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, Driftworks

“...The sublime feeling is not mere pleasure as taste is – it is a mixture of pleasure and pain... Confronted with objects that are too big according to their magnitude or too
violent according to their power, the mind experiences its own limitations.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (Wellek Library Lectures

“He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments — negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It's your sadness, idiot, he'd say.”
― Jean-François Lyotard

“Are we, intellectual sirs, not actively or passively 'producing' more and more words, more books, more articles, ceaselessly refilling the pot-boiler of speech, gorging ourselves on it rather, seizing books and 'experiences', to metamorphose them as quickly as possible into other words, plugging us in here, being plugged in there, just like Mina on her blue squared oilcloth, extending the market and the trade in words of course, but also multiplying the chances of jouissance, scraping up intensities wherever possible, and never being sufficiently dead, for we too are required to go from forty to the hundred a day, and we will never play the whore enough, we will never be dead enough”
― Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy