A Place to Remember
“More light!” — Goethe, last words, March 22, 1832
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“Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and Summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.” — Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism, 1953
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“I carry a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound.” — Franz Liszt, in a letter to Lina Ramann, February 9, 1883
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“Stop, don’t beat him. In truth, his is a soul of a dear friend of mine, one I recognized when I heard him cry.” — Pythagoras, according to Xenophanes, upon seeing a man beating a dog, as written in Diogenes Laertius, Book 8, section 36
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Van Gogh shot himself near the heart in a wheat field where he had recently been painting, walked back to his room at the Auberge Ravoux Inn, and took two days to die. July 29, 1890.
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“it’s so easy to be a poet and so hard to be a man.” — Charles Bukowski, “40,000 Flies” from Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit, 1979
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A Yugoslavian proverb: Reci pravo pa bež (tell the truth and run)
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“On my part I am content not to be considered better-looking than I am, nor of a better temper than I describe, nor more witty and clever than I am. Once more, I have ability, but a mind spoilt by melancholy, for though I know my own language tolerably well, and have a good memory, a mode of thought not particularly confused, I yet have so great a mixture of discontent that I often say what I have to say very badly.” — François de La Rochefoucauld, 1663
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“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.” — Pancho Villa, last words, 1923
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“Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.” — Mark Twain
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Joseph Mitchell’s gravestone bears one of his favorite lines in literature, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73: “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”
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According to John C. Reilly, Terrence Malick, on the set of The Thin Red Line, once paused in the middle of blocking an elaborate combat sequence, pointed up at the sky, and said, “Look at that red-tailed hawk.”
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Coco Chanel kept hundreds of perfume bottles on her vanity, many of them empty. When asked why she held on to them, she replied, “Those bottles are my memories of surrender and conquest, my crown jewels of love.”
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Virginia Woolf’s New Years Resolutions for 1931: “To have none. Not to be tied. To be free & kindly with myself. Sometimes to read, sometimes not to read. To go out, yes—but stay at home in spite of being asked. As for clothes, I think to buy good ones.”
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“I want to see things. This is the only thing I can relate to.” — Carlo Scarpa
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“All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.” — Samuel Beckett
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“We always thought that art was a calling. We were very romantic in our youth. We really thought that people made music and made art and wrote stories because they were the psychic therapists of the clan, of the tribe. It was their job to try and make sense of existence. In that way, art was like a holy calling, and artists were shamen.
Years later, we were shocked to realise that it was primarily about commerce, and that we were looked at with anger and horror simply for being idealistic and utopian.
And everything we’ve done has been about my disenchanted reaction to the commercialisation of the divine… It’s self-explanatory. You can never relax and think you’ve figured it all out. It really is a process of infinite re-evaluation day by day.” — Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, September 2013
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“I pull up swagless into this sauceless void.” — Sam Kriss, “In My Zombie Era”
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“The rizz was non-existent. The ozempic face, flaring. And the charisma is that of an exhausted undertaker on their last corpse of the day.” — Mike Pepi on the Cuomo “In It to Win It” video
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“What is history other than memory without pain?” — Rachel Cusk, Kudos
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“It’s still true that most Americans care more about the price of meat than they do about the exploitation of Bolivian miners.” — Frederik Rzewski, 1976
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“To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense.” — Andrea Long Chu, Females, 2019
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“On a torture instrument called an accordion I stretch my bones into fingers of a witch. My guts have been emptied like bellows for the best sound.” — Valzhyna Mort, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, 2020
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“Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue.” — Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to George Sand, May 10, 1867
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“A poet is a waste-good and an unthrift, in that he is born to make the taverns rich and himself a beggar.” — Robert Greene, according to David Markson
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“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” — Flannery O’Connor