Polly Kourepi > Polly's Quotes

“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Δεν μπορώ να σας εξηγήσω. Όλες οι λέξεις ανάμεσα σε δύο ανθρώπους απαιτούν μία κοινή εμπειρία.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Την απόκρυψη και την καταφυγή από τον πανικό φόβο του θανάτου ο άνθρωπος την εβάφτισε θεούς και θρησκείες. Και ζωή μετά θάνατο. Προπαντός αυτό. Η πίστη στη ζωή μετά θάνατο είναι το σύστημα ανάρτησης, είναι η ραχοκοκαλιά όλων
των θρησκειών. Βρες μου μια θρησκεία, που ο ιδρυτής της να μην εστερέωσε το οικοδόμημα της απάνου στην θεμέλια πέτρα της πίστης για μια ζωή μετά θάνατο, κι εγώ θα σου δείξω πως η θρησκεία αυτή δεν έχει οπαδό ούτε τον ίδιο τον ιδρυτή της.”
― Δημήτρης Λιαντίνης, Γκέμμα

“It seems to me that your oldest friends can offer a glimpse of who you were from a time before you had a sense of yourself.”
― Jessica Francis Kane, Rules for Visiting

“It flashed through her like the sudden apprehended solution of a problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure [...] and for the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her own desires,—of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole. [...] She sat in the deepening twilight forming plans of self-humiliation and entire devotedness; and in the ardor of new discovery, renunciation seemed to her an entrance into that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain. She had not perceived—how could she until she had lived longer?—the inmost truth of the old monk’s outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“I have no idea who dreamed up the idiotic notion that summer vacations require "light" reading. Just the opposite, since the "light" books get read—if any reading's done at all—before bedtime, after the office work and house work, when we lack the concentration required for heavier fare.”
― Wisława Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading

“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

“I don't live in France, I live in myself.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“During a party, Luis Buñuel, seduced by Carrington’s beauty and emboldened by the notion that she had transcended all bourgeois morality, proposed (with his characteristic bluntness) that she become his mistress. Without even waiting for her answer, he gave her the key to the secret studio that he used as a love nest and told her to meet him at three o’clock the next afternoon. Early the next morning, Leonora went to visit the place alone. She found it tasteless: It looked exactly like a motel room. Taking advantage of the fact that she was in her menstrual period, she covered her hands with blood and used them to make bloody handprints all over the walls in order to provide a bit of decoration for that anonymous, impersonal room. Buñuel never spoke to her again.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo

“One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

“One becomes wise only in measures, as he goes through his own insanity.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

“The worst grotesque situations: believing one knows oneself, believing one knows everything about some topic, believing one has judged with absolute impartiality, believing one will love and be loved forever. In conversation, people think one thing and, in trying to communicate it, say something else. The interlocutor hears one thing, but understands something different. When answering, one does not respond to what the other person initially thought, nor to what the other person said, but to what one has understood. The final result: a conversation between deaf people who do not even know how to listen to themselves.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

“Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped.”
― Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh

“All my life I've been harassed by questions: Why is something this way and not another? How do you account for that? This rage to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence.”
― Luis Buñuel

“As inexplicable as the accidents that set it off, our imagination is a crucial privilege. I've tried my whole life simply to accept the images that present themselves to me without trying to analyze them. I remember when we were shooting That Obscure Object of Desire in Seville and I suddenly found myself telling Fernando Rey, at the end of a scene, to pick up a big sack filled with tools lying on a bench, sling it over his shoulder, and walk away. The action was completely irrational, yet it seemed absolutely right to me. Still, I was worried about it, so I shot two versions of the scene: one with the sack, one without. But during the rushes the following day, the whole crew agreed that the scene was much better with the sack. Why? I can't explain it, and I don't enjoy rummaging around in the cliches of psychoanalysis.”
― Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh

“(I’ve always believed that the imagination is a spiritual quality that, like memory, can be trained and developed.)”
― Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Bunuel

“The real purpose of surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself.”
― Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Bunuel