Khalid Khalafallah > Khalid's Quotes

“In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique.”
― Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System

“[Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“And you keep on looking. You look because this is the nature of the footage, to make a channeled path through time, to give things a shape and a destiny.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Author here.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“By the way, I do think that awareness is different from thinking. I am similar to most other people, I believe, in that I do not really do my most important thinking in large, intentional blocks where I sit down uninterrupted in a chair and know in advance what it is I'm going to think about... It doesn't work like that for me.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

“One place is as good as another, in the valley without exit...”
― Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric

“You do not carry the cross. Instead you are all crucified on the timber of your sufficiency, which is given to you, the more you insist, the more you bleed: it suits you to say you carry the cross like a sacred duty, whereas you are heavy with the weight of your necessities. Have the courage not to admit those necessities and lift yourselves up for your own sakes.”
― Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Ideology claims to be binding for the whole society. This development leads to typical problems. As the complexity of society increases, so do the demands upon ideology as a schema for solving problems; in particular, there occurs an unsurveyable increase in the interdependencies among the individual components of an ideology, whose consistency must continue to be maintained. Changes, accommodations, and renovations in an ideology become markedly dífficult, because every small step can have unforeseeable repercussions upon the premises appealed to. The burdens upon the reflexive and opportunistic mechanisms anchored in ideology then become excessive.”
― Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society

“When you've had a bad experience, you sometimes feel compelled to recreate it in a way that allows you to control it.”
― Todd Hido, Todd Hido on Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude

“We all know how the thing we secretly fear is not a secret at all but the open and eternal thing that predicts its own recurrence.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II