Miguel Madeira > Miguel's Quotes

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“A velhice o que é senão a morte estagiando em nosso corpo?”
― Mia Couto, A Varanda do Frangipani

“Nós, mulheres, estamos sempre sob a sombra da lâmina: impedidas de viver enquanto novas; acusadas de não morrer quando já velhas.”
― Mia Couto, A Varanda do Frangipani

“Um herói é como o santo. Ninguém lhe ama de verdade. Se lembram dele em urgências pessoais e aflições nacionais.”
― Mia Couto, A Varanda do Frangipani

“Enquanto ouvir estes relatos você se guarde quieto. O silêncio é que fabrica as janelas por onde o mundo se transparenta. Não escreva, deixe esse caderno no chão. Se comporte como água no vidro. Quem é gota sempre pinge, quem é cacimbo se evapora. Neste asilo, o senhor se aumente de muita orelha. É que aqui vivemos muito oralmente.”
― Mia Couto, A Varanda do Frangipani

“O velho acenou fingindo perceber. Fica mal um homem perguntar explicação de prosa alheia.”
― Mia Couto, A Varanda do Frangipani

“Padeci tais fomes que só não morri porque a morte não me encontrou, tão magro que estava.”
― Mia Couto, A Varanda do Frangipani

“Demasio-me nesta palavração”
― Mia Couto, A Varanda do Frangipani

“- Aí é que você se engana, Nhonhoso: eu não sou bom. Sou é muito vagaroso nas maldades.”
― Mia Couto, A Varanda do Frangipani

“As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I'd lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age - just as a lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn't understand that clarity is in the mind.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“In a normal education everything
is designed to suppress spontaneity, but I wanted to develop it.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to weep. I was astounded. I'd had no idea that literature
could affect me in such a way. If I'd have wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“Almost all were total failures-they couldn't have been put on in the village hall for the author's friends. It wasn't a matter of lack of talent, but of miseducation. The authors of the pseudo-plays assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life. My play had been influenced by Beckett, but at least the content had been mine.”
― Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

“For example, many students will begin an improvisation, or a scene, in a rather feeble way. It's as if they're ill, and lacking in vitality. They've learned to play for sympathy. However easy the problem,
they'll use the same old trick of looking inadequate. This ploy is supposed to make the onlookers have sympathy with them if they 'fail' and it's expected to bring greater rewards if they 'win'. Actually this down-in-the-mouth attitude almost guarantees
failure, and makes everyone fed up with them. No one has sympathy with an adult who takes such an attitude, but when they were children it probably worked. As adults they're still doing it. Once they've laughed at themselves and understood how unproductive such an attitude is, students
who look 'ill' suddenly look 'healthy'. The attitude of the group may instantly change.”
― Keith Johnstone

“A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.”
― Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle

“They are not in charge of preparing her berth for its next occupant or, like the staff at the nearby control tower, assigning her a shipping lane for the journey out to the North Sea. They wish only to admire her and note her passage. They bring to the study of harbour life a devotion more often witnessed in relation to art, their behaviour implying a belief that creativity and intelligence can be as present in the transport of axles around the tip of the western Sahara as they are in the use of impasto in a female nude. Yet how fickle museum-goers seem by comparison, with their impatient interest in cafeterias, their susceptibility to gift shops, their readiness to avail themselves of benches. How seldom has a man spent two hours in a rain-storm in front of Hendrickje Bathing with only a thermos of coffee for sustenance.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”
― Alain de Botton

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Que viaje à roda do seu quarto quem está à beira dos Alpes, de inverno, em Turim, que é quase tão frio como São Petersburgo – entende-se. Mas com este clima, com esse ar que Deus nos deu, onde a laranjeira cresce na horta, e o mato é de murta, o próprio Xavier de Maistre, que aqui escrevesse, ao menos ia até o quintal.”
― Almeida Garrett, Viagens na Minha Terra

“Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.”
― Kenneth Boulding

“Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
― Mark Twain

“Distracted from distraction by distraction”
― T.S. Eliot

“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”
― John Berger

“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.”
― John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous: Essays

“To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.”
― John Berger

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”
― Jim Harrison

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. ”
― Seneca

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business