Stefan

“A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.”
― George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 2 My Country Right or Left 1940 - 1943

“Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."

[Modernism's Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]”
― Robert Hughes