Spurious

You are able to destroy everything but if you meet up with someone who is already destroyed, who is definitely on the edge between the life and the death, then these people have to stop. And everyone who has human being, who has humanity, has to stop.

This is my illusion - I believe still in humanity, and I believe still everybody has this humanity because it's in the blood. I know this is a delusion, but I want to believe.

Bela Tarr, interviewed

If you believe in God, you are mad without having gone mad. It is similar to being sick without suffering from any specific illness.

'One thought of God is worth more than the entire world' (Catherine Emmerich). Poor saint, she was so terribly right!

The restlessness of sleepless nights digs trenches where the corpses of memory are rotting.

As a function of despair, God should continue to exist even in the face of irrefutable proof that he does not exist. Truly, every can be used as argument for or against him, because everything in the world both confirms and denies his divinity. Blasphemy and prayer are equally justified. When uttered in the same breath, one comes very close to the Supreme Equivocator.

From the cradle to the grace, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

The globally positioned consumer-citizen is promised freedom and mobility through the wonders of the Internet, but this constant connectivity is in reality just another pressure. Digital consumption becomes an obligation, almost a form of self-care. Like unpaid technicians, we all obediently maintain our own media networks, and we are constantly contactable (especially by employers) through the miracle of the mobile phone, its de-yuppification another example of remote control disguised as liberation.

from Ivor Southwood's Non Stop Inertia

I often think of the hermits of ancient Egypt who dug their own graves and wept in them day and night. When asked why they cried they replied that they wept for their soul.

In the infinity of the desert, a grave is an oasis, a place for comfort. To have a fixed place in space, one digs a hole in the desert. And one dies so that won't get lost.

E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

The painter talks, and I listen. I understand little of what he says, often he speaks too softly, as if talking to himself, or else I don't undersand it because it doesn't seem cohenrent, or else because I'm too stupid.

[...] I have observed the painter Strauch, I have lain in wait for him, I have lied to him, because that is what my assignment has called upon me to do, I have driven him crazy with my questions, much crazier than he was before, and I struck him on the head with my silences, on his head that he fears so much. I bothered him with my youth. With my plans. With my fears. With my incapacity. With my moodiness. I talk about death without knowong what death, what life is, what any of it is ...

Thomas Bernhard, Frost

One starts off writing with a certain zest, but a time comes when the pen merely grates the dusty ink, and not a drop of life flows, and life is all outside, outside the window, outside oneself, and it seems that never more can one escape into a page one is writing, open out into another world, leap the gap.

[...] A page is good only when we turn it and find life urging along ...

Sister Theodora, in Calvino's Our Ancestors

Prefix: What did you think when I told you I loved the record?

 Josh T Pearson: I’m kind of saddened of by it. That sounds stupid, but if you really love it, obviously some bad things have happened to you. If they hadn’t, you could be dismissive and wouldn’t need to spend any time with my album. People gravitate towards light if they’re healthy. It’s not natural to go with the darkness. I’d probably tip my hat and pat you on the back if I saw you, and say “I’m sorry brother. We’ll get through this hopefully.” I’m sorry that you like it.

Interview

... there is not going to be a next serious thing in the novel. Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishoners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words. 

Gore Vidal, 'French Letters'

I don't believe in materialism, this consumer society, this capitalism, this monstrosity that goes on here.... I really do believe in something, and I call it 'a day will come'. And one day it will come. Well, it probably won't come, because they've already destroyed it for us, for so many thousands of years they've always destroyed it. It won't come and yet I believe in it. For if I can't believe in it, then I can't go on writing either.

Ingeborg Bachmann, interviewed (cited)

However much we want the dramaturgy to stay out of it, it’s always there. And it’s some kind of game that little Lars has staged in some primary school, and it’ll never have any reality because in a basic basic basic sense deep deep deep down you’re onehundredandninetythousand percent lonely in your own tiny tiny little stupid, ridiculous, humiliating world.

Lars Von Trier, via Notes For Nothing.