Daniel Frank

“Your first minutes on the streets of an unfamiliar city are always special: what happens in later months or years can never supplant them. These minutes are filled with the visual equivalent of nuclear energy, a kind of nuclear power of attention. With penetrating insight and an all-pervading excitement, you absorb a huge universe – houses, trees, faces of passersby, signs, squares, smells, dust, cats and dogs, the color of the sky. During these minutes, like an omnipresent God, you bring a new world into being: you create, you build inside yourself a whole city with all its streets and squares, with its courtyards and patios, with its sparrows, with its thousands of years of history, with its food shops and its shops for manufactured goods, with its opera house and its canteens. This city that suddenly arises from nonbeing is a special city; it differs from the city that exists in reality – it is the city of a particular person.”
― Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook

“Some people think it’s an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets, and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming—all the effects a certain class of people produce so as to look like people of a certain class. And his place looked so much like the others that it would never have been noticed, though it all seemed quite exceptional to him.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories

“My ties with Fårö have several origins. The first was intuitive.

“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your internal imaginings of forms, proportions, colours, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections. Security is here. Don’t ask why. Explanations are clumsy rationalizations with hindsight. In, for instance, your profession you look for simplification, proportion, exertion, relaxation, breathing. The Fårö landscape gives you a wealth of all that.

Other reasons: I must find a counterweight to all the theatre. if I were to rant and rave on the shore, a gull, at most, would take off. On the stage, such an exhibition would be disastrous.

Sentimental reasons: I would retreat from the world, read the books I hadn't read, meditate, cleanse my soul. [after a month or two I was hopelessly involved in the islanders problems, something which resulted in the 1969 Fårö Document.)

Further sentimental reasons: during the filming of Persona, Liv and i were overwhelmed by passion. With monumental lack of judgment, I built the house with the idea of a mutual existence on the island. I forgot to ask Liv what she thought.”
― Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern