Alex Henderson > Alex's Quotes

“The act of seeing is no small thing. To see something is to be possessed by it. Sometimes it carries off a part of you, sometimes it’s your whole soul.”
― Motojirō Kajii

“Mēs taču neesam vāji cilvēki, bet aristokrāti, un pie tam vēl strādnieki.”
― Kristīne Želve, Grosvaldi

“If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“She might, in fact, go crazy, as has happened to a lot of people who break rules. Not the people who play at rebellion but really only solidify their already dominant positions in society...but those who take some larger action that disrupts the social order. Who try to push through the doors that are usually closed to them. They do sometimes go crazy, these people, because the world is telling them not to want the things they want. It can seem saner to give up--but then one goes insane from giving up.”
― E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

“Un beigās mēs nebūsim laimīgi, mēs būsim dzīvojuši.”
― Kristīne Želve, Grosvaldi

“History repeats itself. Someone says this.
History throws its shadow over beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
history is the little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of,
I know history. There are many names in history... but none of them are ours.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Question your tea spoons.”
― Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

“The cliché is that illness shows the mottled wolf skull beneath the pampered skin – but it can also be a welcome corridor, returning you to places you’d left behind. Suddenly, in the antiseptic hospital room one afternoon, you remember them all: so many unstarry things. The way shadows caressed a wall in a vacant lot in Berlin, one rainy November day in … 1976, was it? A scrum of garish fans surrounding you on Sunset Boulevard. Postwar London, whose bombsites seemed to harbour all the time in the world. Make-up counters, listening booths, bakelite curves, saloon bar mirrors, diamanté in a jewellery box that played Swan Lake when the lid clicked up. The strange snake hiss of early TV. A new world inventing itself in the middle of the 20th century, when images were things that genuinely shocked, carriers of forbidden knowledge. Something torn from a Hollywood gossip mag or a single image in a clunky library book on Surrealism could literally change your life. Penguin Modern Classic paperbacks; Genet and his cruisey down-is-up theology; Andy and his abyssal Wow. The surprising new meanings ‘love’ could develop far away from home. Backstage’s suffocating air. The way she walked; the way she talked.”
― Ian Penman

“Is it better to endure bad art for the spotless ideology it promotes, or to continue to swoon before sublime art made by awful people?”
― Ian Penman, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track

“Astoņi ir labs, spēcīgs skaitlis - apgriezta bezgalības zīme, savērpta nulle. Tam piemīt četrinieka stabilitāte, bet ne tā norobežojošās, baismīgās sienas. Astoņi ir dzimšana un nāve, pārdzimšana un celšanās.”
― Daina Tabūna, Raganas

“Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept