Ivana > Ivana's Quotes

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”
― Henri Bergson

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
― Henri Bergson

“Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

“All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

“everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death”
― Thomas Bernhard

“Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn't born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“Tačno je da sam srećan samo u kolima, između mesta sa kojeg sam krenuo i mesta ka kojem sam se uputio. Srećan sam samo kada putujem. Kada stignem, nebitno gde, odjednom postajem najnesrećnije moguće biće. U suštini, ja sam jedno od onih stvorenja koja ne mogu da podnesu da se nalaze bilo gde i srećna su samo između mesta. Godinama sam verovao da će me takvo katastrofalno stanje neizbežno odvesti u potpuno ludilo, kojega sam se pribojavao celog života.”
― Thomas Bernhard

“What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell the truth and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence

“In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Amar es dar lo que no se tiene”
― J. Lacan

“...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.”
― Jacques Lacan

“Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

“I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

“Cuz words”
― Jacques Lacan

“Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
― Roland Barthes

“The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.”
― Barthes Roland, Camera lucida: Reflections on photography