Igor Razvodovsky > Igor's Quotes

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”
― Woody Allen

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

“We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.”
― Susan Sontag

“We must find a balance between "reddish whites," "bluish whites" and "yellowish whites," and decide on the proper length and thickness of the fiber. Then each part of the book can play its proper role: the front cover conveys a powerful silence; the inside cover the purity of first openings; the title page the texture of new beginnings; while the body of the text sets the words and pictures against a clear background, or whispers "touch me!" to the reader's fingertips”
― Kenya Hara, White

“You want to leave the moat, to go back to the room; you’re already turning and trying to find the door, covered with fake leather, in the steep wall of the moat, but the master succeeds in grabbing your hand and, looking straight in your eyes, says: Your assignment: describe the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a hummingbird, the steeple of the New Maiden Convent, a shoot of bird cherry, the bend of the Lethe, the tail of any village dog, a night of love, mirages over hot asphalt, the bright midday in Berezov, the face of a flibbertigibbet, the garden of hell, compare the termite colony to the forest anthill, the sad fate of leaves to the serenade of a Venetian gondolier, and transform a cicada into a butterfly, turn rain into hail, day into night, give us today our daily bread, make a sibilant out of a vowel, prevent the crash of the train whose engineer is asleep, repeat the thirteenth labor of Hercules, give a smoke to a passerby, explain youth and old age, sing a song about a bluebird bringing water in the morn, turn your face to the north, to the Novgorodian barbicans, and then describe how the doorman knows it is snowing outside, if he sits in the foyer all day, talks to the elevator operator, and does not look out the window because there is no window; yes, tell how exactly, and in addition, plant in your orchard a white rose of the winds, show it to the teacher Pavel and, if he likes it, give the white rose to the teacher Pavel, pin the flower to his cowboy shirt or to his dacha hat, bring joy to the man who departed to nowhere, make your old pedagogue—a joker, a clown, and a wind-chaser—happy.”
― Sasha Sokolov, A School for Fools

“Человек не может исчезнуть моментально и полностью, прежде он превращается в нечто отличное от себя по форме и по сути, -- например, в вальс, в отдаленный, звучащий чуть слышно вечерний вальс, то есть исчезает частично, а уж потом исчезает полностью.”
― Sasha Sokolov, A School for Fools

“Хожу в осеннем пальто, а если бы настал мороз, то пришлось бы называть это пальто зимним.”
― Viktor Shklovsky, Zoo or Letters Not About Love

“Он в картинах не европеец, а витебец. Марк Шагал не принадлежит к "культурному миру". ... Так вот, витебские мальчишки все рисуют, как Шагал, и это ему в похвалу, он сумел быть в Париже и Питере витебцем.”
― Victor Shklovsky, Zoo or Letters Not About Love

“The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate.”
― Douglas Engelbart

“Flat paintings are so commonplace that we seldom ask why flat representations work so well. If we really experience the world as 3D, an image seen in a flat picture would distort jarringly when we move in front of it. But it does not do so as long as it is flat. A folded picture, in contrast, distorts as we move around it. Our ability to interpret representations that are less than 3D indicates that we do not experience the visual world as truly 3D, and has allowed flat pictures (and movies) to dominate our visual environment as an economical and convenient substitute for 3D representations. This tolerance of flat representations is found in all cultures, infants, and in other species, so it cannot result from learning a convention of representation. Imagine how different our culture would be if we could not make sense of flat representations.”
― Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present

“I myself must also say I believe it is true that in the end humanitarianism will triumph; only I fear that at the same time the world will be one big hospital and each person will be the other person's humane keeper.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey

“Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Principles of design:
1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.
2. Simplify the structure of tasks.
3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation.
4. Get the mappings right.
5. Exploit the power of constraints.
6. Design for error.
7. When all else fails, standardize.”
― Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

“We should begin thinking of events as the primary realities and of time as an abstraction from them—a concept derived mainly from regular repeating events, such as the ticking of clocks. Events are perceived, but time is not (Gibson, 1975).”
― James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

“And the careful manipulation of the occluding edges of clothing with progressive revealing of skin is a form of the theatrical art called stripping.”
― James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

“One sees the environment not with the eyes but with the eyes-in-the-head-on-the-body-resting-on-the-ground.”
― James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

“All ingredients need salt. The noodle or tender spring pea would be narcissistic to imagine it already contained within its cell walls all the perfection it would ever need. We seem, too, to fear that we are failures at being tender and springy if we need to be seasoned. It’s not so: it doesn’t reflect badly on pea or person that either needs help to be most itself.”
― Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

“School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out-- when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.”
― Emily Wilson, The Odyssey

“What is distinctive about the customs surrounding hospitality in [archaic Greek] culture is that elite men who have entered one another's homes and have been entertained appropriately are understood to have created a bond of "guest-friendship" (xenia) between their households that will continue into future generations. ... It is created not by proximity and kinship, but by a set of behaviors that create bonds between people who are geographically distant from each other. Xenia is thus a networking tool that allows for the expansion of Greek power, from the unit of the family to the city-state and then across the Mediterranean world. It is the means by which unrelated elite families can connect to one another as equals, without having to fight for dominance. ... The poem's episodes can be seen as a sequence of case studies in the concept of xenia.”
― Emily Wilson, The Odyssey

“Вообще, было бы неплохо, если бы проза так же перла, как трава или стишки. Не было бы всех этих споров, хорошо написал или плохо. Поперло – значит, хорошо. Не поперло – плохо.”
― Алексей Сальников, Опосредованно

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.”
― Stewart Brand