Asli Cakir

“The only way to survive such shitty times, if you ask me, is to write and read big, fat books, you know? And I’m writing now another book on Hegelian dialectics, subjectivity, ontology, quantum physics and so on. That’s the only way to survive. Like Lenin. I will use his example. You know what Lenin did, in 1915, when World War I exploded? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“In this climate of profoundly disrupted relationships the child faces a formidable developmental task. She must find a way to form primary attachments to caretakers who are either dangerous or, from her perspective, negligent. She must find a way to develop a sense of basic trust and safely with caretakers who are untrustworthy and unsafe. She must develop a sense of self in relation to others who are helpless, uncaring or cruel. She must develop a capacity for bodily self-regulation in an environinent in which her body is at the disposal of others' needs as well as a capacity for self-soothing in an environment without solace. She must develop the capacity for initiative in an environment which demands that she bring her will into complete conformity with that of her abuser. And ultimately, she must develop a capacity for intimacy out of an environment where all intimate relationships are corrupt, and an identity out of an environment which defines her as a whore and a slave.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Some poems survive it to become poems in another language,” he argued, “but others refuse to live in any language but their own, in which case the translator can manage no more than a reproduction, an effigy, of the original.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“Interesting how some words that hold basically the same meaning can have different connotations. Take ‘outlaw’ and ‘criminal’ for instance.
‘Outlaw’ has an almost romantic, nostalgic meaning – you tend to think of Jesse James or Robin Hood when you think of outlaws. Billy the Kid has been described as both a ‘notorious outlaw’ and a ‘beloved folk hero.’
‘Criminal’ however has a completely different connotation. We think of muggers, burglars, armed robbers etc.
Nobody really wants to have a ‘criminal’ in their family tree, but the idea of having ‘outlaw blood’ is exciting and glamorous”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe