Nayra Alexandre > Nayra's Quotes

“You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to every one as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn't Ernest.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I have scars on my hand from touching certain people. Once, in the park, when Frannie was still in the carriage, I put my hand on the downy pate of her head and left it there too long. Another time, at Loew's Seventy-second Street, with Zooey during a spooky movie. He was about six or seven, and he went under the seat to avoid watching a scary scene. I put my hand on his head. Certain heads, certain colors and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. Other things, too. Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-yellow mark on the palm of my right hand.”
― J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

“How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

“Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.”
― Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game

“I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade. The university lectures that I had found pretty impressive on first hearing, have faded away. Now I am listening to one on Pirandello. Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I’ve seen recently — they have already faded. Authors of thousands of books I’ve read... All that remains are the colours of their bindings, their covers. I don’t remember much about Beauty and the Beast, but I remember clearly, vividly the hear of the day as we were crossing the Rhine bridge, to see the film. Everything that I see, or red, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors. No, I am not a novelist. No precision of observation, detail. With me, everything is mood, mood, or else —simply nothingness.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“I go for a long night walk, in order to get out of the factory day.
I walk and i wander through the network of the streets, neon lights and night crowds.
This woman on the corner, she was shouting at me: ''Ay, why are you so sad?''
Lady of the night, you haven't see me really sad.
Right now i am in my happiest mood.
I continue walking. How could she really understand the depths of my sadness.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are.

You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.

There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level.
It's got to happen inside first.”
― James Douglas Morrison, The Collected Writings

“I rely on images of violence, which bring the shock of pain, to penetrate the barriers people erect and defend, not simple defenses; the phony facades people live behind. Blocking their perceptions from coming in, and blocking their feelings from coming put. There are two way I try to shatter those facades, or at least make a hole where something can get in, to let the trapped feelings out--one way is violence, pain. The other is eroticism.”
― Jim Morrison, The Collected Works of Jim Morrison

“In fact I thought life was pretty much a losing proposition, and I didn't mind saying so.”
― Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

“it was a crime to take anything too seriously, as oppressed as we felt by the adult and conventional world. All the most serious art is not only sad but hilarious. What other intelligent way to live is there but to laugh about it? The alternative, also respectable, is suicide. But how could you do that? Not only would it betray a woeful lack of humor, but it would keep you from finding out what was going to happen next.”
― Richard Hell, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“This must be the 26th February 23rd I have
lived through: over a quarter of a century of Februaries, and would I could
cut a slice of recollection back through them all & trace the spiraling stair
of my ascent adultward - or is it a descent? I feel I have lived enough to last
my life in musings, tracings of crossings & re-crossings with people, mad
and sane, stupid and brilliant, beautiful and grotesque, infant and antique,
cold and hot, pragmatic and dream-ridden, dead and alive. My house of
days and masks is rich enough so that I might and must spend years fishing,
hauling up the pearl-eyed, horny, scaled and sea-bearded monsters sunk
long, long in the sargasso of my imagination”
― Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

“It is incredible how fear is built into you, by your parents and others surrounding you. You’re so innocent in the beginning; you don’t know.”
― Marina Abramović, Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

“If you experiment, you have to fail. By definition, experimenting means going to territory where you’ve never been, where failure is very possible. How can you know you’re going to succeed? Having the courage to face the unknown is so important. I”
― Marina Abramović, Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

“I had come to believe that art must be disturbing, art must ask questions, art must predict the future. If art is just political, it becomes like newspaper. It can be used once, and the next day it's yesterday's news. Only layers of meaning can give long life to art - that way, society takes what it needs from the work over time.”
― Marina Abramović, Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

“What you’re doing is not important. What is really important is the state of mind from which you do it. Performance”
― Marina Abramović, Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove”
― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays

“To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone “oppressed” to break them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make fifty-one per cent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class. The creation of this revolutionary “class” was from the virtual beginning the “idea” of the women’s movement, and the tendency for popular discussion of the movement to center for so long around day-care centers is yet another instance of that studied resistance to political ideas which characterizes our national life.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays