On Ugliness

 

“Beauty is, in some ways, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages, nevertheless a beautiful object must always follow certain rules … 

Ugliness is unpredictable and offers an infinite range of possibilities. Beauty is finite. Ugliness is infinite, like God.”

Umberto Eco

The Glass Menagerie

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”








“How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.”

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”





“The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”









“People are not so dreadful when you know them. That's what you have to remember! And everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems. You think of yourself as having the only problems, as being the only one who is disappointed. But just look around you and you will see lots of people as disappointed as you are.”








“The future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into ever lasting regret if you don't plan for it!”








“attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.”


Tennessee Williams

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”

  

 

“When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.”




 

 

 

“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.”

“One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.”








“Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”

Roland Barthes

Notes from Underground

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human”

“The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.”






“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”



“I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.”



“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”



“I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.”



“Can a man of perception respect himself at all?”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Animal Farm

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

 

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

 

“Four legs good, two legs bad.”



 

“Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”

 

“Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.”

George Orwell