Ali Zohdi

“Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“I've never been a coward at heart, although I've always been a coward in action”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved's absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. The singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable present; I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution: you have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense is: a pure portion of anxiety.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments