“Andreas Ban would like to put several swifts on his chest to rest, to breathe with him like sleeping children. Little black birds like cheerful death. Painless. Little black birds with big eyes and a small beak, which peck noiselessly at his insides, see what is there and are silent. Andreas Ban stretches his arms toward the sky, imagining that he is flying, imagining himself in a flock of swifts and lets out a stifled cry. Small birds, they die when they are alone. He, Andreas Ban, is alone.” DeathSadnessMortalityBirds Book:Belladonna Source: Belladonna
“Here’s a window onto madness. Our planet is a cosmic madhouse, said Goethe as much as a hundred years and more ago, to which Nietzche, while he was still of sound mind,... added: With individuals madness is rare; but with groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” PeopleGroupsSocietyMadnessInsanityNationalism Book:EEG Source: EEG
“What to do with the lives around us, within us? How to classify them? They are and are not examined lives, monochrome canvases with blots, smudges, freckles scattered over a space made up of shackled time. Examined lives (canvases), crisscrossed with shallow empty spaces, dappled with little bumps—hillocks—and narrow furrows, cuttings, grooves, many alike, in which slow, stagnant waters swirl. Lives with rounded edges, easily catalogued, easily connected, easily nailed onto the shelves of memory. And forgotten there. Then, those others: lives crisscrossed, entangled, knotted wit veins, scars, clefts which continue to breathe under the gravestones over the little mounds of our being, scabbed-over wounds that still bleed within. Impenetrable lives. They flicker in the darkness, sending out little sparks of light, fluorescent, like the bones of corpses. Placed side by side, there is no current between them, because both these kinds of life collapse into themselves, silently and menacingly like rising waters. Kaleidoscopic lives. Like the drawings of schizoid patients.” PeopleWarLossHistoryTraumaLivesVictims Book:EEG Source: EEG
“…he sees a play by Arthur Kopit, he doesn’t remember the title, something about the way a lie becomes the truth and the truth a lie.” TruthLiesMemory Book:Belladonna Source: Belladonna
“A view of the sea drives people crazy—in a positive sense, it calms them, but it disturbs them too. There must be some atavistic link between the eye, the soul and water, extensive waters of mystic depths and an inaccessible, dark bottom. Some connections quiver, are inexplicable.” SoulSpiritWaterNatureOceanConnectionMysticismThe Sea Book:EEG Source: EEG
“War, along with fear, reaches you in an instant. It penetrates walls, it moves over mountains, through rivers. It enters the human mind, human hearts, human souls. It settles there and will not leave.” WarFear Book:EEG Source: EEG
“Individual destinies sink, small lives merge into one great false mass event that keeps repeating its statistical story.” DestinyHistoryFateCyclesStatistics Book:Belladonna Source: Belladonna
“...we are all traveling along parallel tracks, tracks that touch for only an instant through the crazed sparks that scatter from under the wheels of an eternally rushing train.” LifeTimeHistoryFateMomentntum Book:Belladonna Source: Belladonna
“It is damaging to tie yourself. To a country and a home. Sooner or later both will fuck you up.” HomeIdentityConnectionsTiesNationalismPlaceAllegiances Book:EEG Source: EEG
“...when I see the other, I understand myself. To understand myself, to respect myself, I have to respect the other, because I am the other. And responsibility for the other is a fundamental human value. Without it, we become monsters.” HumanityUnderstandingResponsibilityCompassionEmpathyConnection Book:Belladonna Source: Belladonna
“...the intellectual is a person who nurtures, preserves and propagates independent judgment, a person loyal exclusively to truth, a courageous and wrathful individual for whom no force of this world is too great or too frightening not to be subjected to scrutiny and called to account. ... A true intellectual, a genuine one, is always an outsider, …he is a person who lives in self-imposed exile on the margins of society.” SocietyIndependenceAuthenticityFree ThoughtIntellectuals Book:Belladonna Source: Belladonna
“In other words, melancholy would be a pathological form of mourning, a sick flight from reality, a flight from the outside world into a refuge, into the inner world of the psyche. What if reality is sick, what then? What if the inner world is destroyed, in ruins and robbed, where to then? So, in grief, the world becomes poor and empty, while in melancholy the ego is like some kind of abandoned archaeological discovery that has been dug up. Yes, the melancholic is a radical atheist who in his hollow discourse worships a dead god.” PainGriefPsychologyDepressionMourningMelancholyTraumama Book:Belladonna Source: Belladonna
“Subtle distinctions of pronunciation in our language are being lost and words are becoming slimy, spoken often with an idiotic smile as speakers fashionably soften nonexistent consonants. Degenerate. Like children, half-articulate, vacuous, infantile orators roll words around their mouths like hot potatoes, as though they were toothless, they shift them about, squash them, then open their mouths to eject a mash, a sticky pre-masticated porridge, which slides down their chins.” CultureLanguageDegradationPronunciationCultural Loss Book:EEG Source: EEG
“Pasts are free-thinking, pasts like to roam, pasts traverse borders, glittering gaily, pasts are bold travelers, sliding through their own molehill-like labyrinths.” MemoriesPasts Book:Trieste Source: Trieste
“...it is precisely about things which it is impossible to speak of that one must speak…” Speak UpDefendBear WitnessVocalize Book:Belladonna Source: Belladonna
“The philosophy of the province is a philosophy of a closed circle that does not allow an apostasy, without which there is no creativity. The philosophy of the province is a normative and normalizing, suprapersonal and impersonal philosophy, it shuts out all aspects of life, education, sport, nutrition, nature, love, work, language, religion and death (which is far from being the death of an individual) replacing life with rigid forms of the normative which apply to all.” PhilosophyNarrow MindednessProvincialismRestrictions Book:Belladonna Source: Belladonna