Spiral > Spiral's Quotes

“I just want to hear something I haven't heard before”
― John Peel

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.”
― Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

“Αυτό πάει να πει να 'σαι σιβιλάιζντ. Να πατάς στα σκατά με αψηλό τακούνι.”
― Δημοσθένης Παπαμάρκος, Γκιακ

“Η ζωή είναι ένα μεγαλοπρεπές τίποτα χωρίς σκοπό, μια μαύρη τρύπα που τη σκεπάζουμε με κουρελόχαρτα, με επινοήσεις, με θεούς και δαίμονες, με αφηγήσεις – εντέλει: με λέξεις που μόνο εμείς καταλαβαίνουμε, με λέξεις που μας απαιτούν για να υπάρξουν ως τέτοιες, αλλά που δεν είναι τίποτα πέρα από αυτό: λέξεις. Ίσως όχι τόσο θνητές όσο εμείς, θνητές όμως κι αυτές”
― Μαρία Ξυλούρη

“Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed form kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“...blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos. ”
― Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic

“I don’t know what is my purpose in this world. As for everything else, I have no doubts. I have no honor, nor homeland, nor faith. I lack the values upon which one bases a belief system. I ignore everything that defines a human being. I remain as apart from things, be they society, family, tradition, history, as I was in my youth, or perhaps more than back then, now that I know there is no hope. That the future does not exist. That only the here and now prevails, and that in this reduced space, which is the present, the drama that is ours is resolved.”
― Esdras Parra

“Τι γίνεται ένα έθνος δυο ανθρώπων όταν πεθαίνει ο ένας τους;”
― Μαρία Ξυλούρη, Η νυχτερινή βάρδια του καλλιγράφου

“What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.”
― Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

“The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.”
― Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

“Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.”
― Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction