Some quotes I’ve collected over the years from books I love. No particular order but rather a long compilation of words that moved me with some of my travel photos in between.

“He now understood something without words: that humankind had not elevated itself sufficiently, had not yet earned the right to that so splendidly termed stance of galactocentrism, which had long been glorified, yet which did not mean searching only for beings that resemble oneself and understanding only such beings, it meant not interfering in matters that did not concern human beings. Occupy an empty place, by all means, why not; but don’t attack something that exists, that over millions of years has established its own equilibrium of survival—an active survival that is not dependent on anything except radiation forces and material forces, and that is no better and no worse than the survival of the proteinaceous compounds we call animals or human beings. It was in precisely this state, brimming with the lofty, all-embracing galactocentric understanding of every existing form, that Rohan heard the repeated high-pitched howl of the sirens like a needle penetrating his nervous system.” Lem The Invincible

“Then the bells stopped; the world returned, I regained my sight and saw her reborn, strangled, white on the grass, which was green, like bile; she was transformed into a white river pebble, grown into the ground, a bear ́s foot bloomed from her armpit, snowdrop bloomed from between her thighs, catkins from a poplar drifted over her light skin, I did not know whether to leave her to be buried in them, or to lay her in a deep whirlpool, or to carry her away and place her in the stone grave above the forest. Should I have lain down beside her and turned into spring grass and willow branches?” Mesa Selimovic

“During this period Artaud was given an ancient knotted cane by the wife of a Dutch painter named Kristians Tonny; she claimed that it had belonged to Saint Patrick in Ireland. It was an impressive object, and Artaud became hugely attached to it. Like the sword he had been given in Cuba, the cane became both a weapon of violence and sign of sexual vulnerability. Artaud began to carry it constantly, and when friends admired the cane , and tried to touch it, he became enraged, complaining that it was if they had tried to grab his penis. He took it to a blacksmiths and had a metal tip welded on it ́s end: when he walked along the boulavards striking the cane against the ground, it shot out sparks behind him....” S. Barber Antonin Artaud

“Now, all other sacred trees, plants an herbs have peculiar properties. The alder ́s timber is waterproof and its leaves yield a royal red dye; birch is the host of the hallucigenetic fly-cap mushroom; oak and ash attract lightening for a holy fire; the mandrake root is anti-spasmodic. The foxglove yields digitalis which accelerates the beat of the heart; poppies are opiates; ivy has toxic leaves and its flowers provide bees with the last honey of the year. But the berries of the mistletoe, widely known in folklore as an “allheal”, have no medicinal properties, though greedily eaten by wood pigeons and other non migratory birds in winter. The leaves are equally valueless; and the timber, though tough, can be put to few uses. Why then was the mistletoe singled out as the most sacred and curative of plants? The only answer can be that the Druids used it as an emblem of their own peculiar way of thought. Here is a tree that is no tree, but fastens itself alike an oak, apple, poplar, beech, thorn, even pine, grows green, nourishing itself on the topmost branches when the rest of the forest seems asleep, and the fruit of which is credited with curing all spiritual disorders. Lopped sprigs of it are tied to the lintel of a door and invite sudden and surprising kisses. The symbolism is exact, if we can equate Druidic with Sufic thought, which is not planted like a tree, as religions are planted, but self-engrafted on a tree already in existence; it keeps green though the tree itself is alseep. in the sense that religions go dead with formalism; and the main motive power of its growth is love, not ordinary animal passion or domestic affection but a sudden surprising recognition of love so rare and high that the heart seems to sprout wings.” Robert Graves – Introduction to “The Sufis”

“You don’t need to take drugs to hallucinate; improper language can fill your world with phantoms and spooks of many kinds.” Robert A. Wilson

“Sis -Maria Here I sat, waiting, waiting- but for nothing. Beyond good and evil, sometimes enjoying the light, sometimes the shade, completely the play, completely lake, completely noon, completely time without a goal. There, suddenly, my friend! One became two- -And Zarathustra passed my way” Nietzsche

“O mouths man is searching for a new idiom- On which no grammarian anywhere will have a hold.... The word is sudden – a God is trembling” Apollinaire

“He suddenly seemed ridiculous to himself, with the Weyr cannon he had snatched from the dead man; more, he felt unnecessary in this landscape of perfect death, where only inanimate forms could survive and carry out their inscrutable actions that no living eye would ever see. It was not with horror but with stunned admiration that he had taken part in what happened a moment before. He knew that none of the scientists would be capable of sharing his feelings, but now he wished to go back not only as a messenger bearing news of the destruction of the missing men, but also as a person who would demand that the planet be left alone. Not everything everywhere is for us, he thought as he walked slowly downhill. By the light from the sky he was soon able to reach the battlefield. Here he had to quicken his pace, because the radiation from the glazed rocks, whose nightmarish outlines loomed in the gathering dusk, was ever more intense. In the end he broke into a run; the sound of his steps was repeated by some of the stone walls and reflected onto others, and in this perpetual echo that[…]” Lem The Invincible

“With its receptive, hammering music, “death Fugue” is as direct as verse can be in its approach to its subject. It also makes two huge implicit claims about what poetry in our time is, or should be, capable of. One is that language can measure up to any subject whatsoever: however unspeakable the Holocoust may be, there is a poetry that can speak it. The other is that the German language in particular, corrupted to the bone during the Nazi era by euphemism and a kind of leering doublespeak, is capable of telling the truth about Germany ́s immediate past.” Coetzee on Paul Celan

“Presumably, it would have been wiser to take letters of recommendation , to jot down two or three telephone numbers at least, before going to Istanbul. I didn’t do that. Presumably, it would have made sense to make friends with someone, get into contact, look at the life of the place from the inside, instead of dismissing the local population as an alien crowd, instead of regarding people as so much psychological dust in one’s eyes.Who knows? Perhaps my attitude towards has in its own whiff of the east about it, too. When it comes down to it, where am I from? Still, at a certain age a man gets tired of his own kind, weary of cluttering up his conscious and subconscious. One more, or ten more, tales of cruelty? Another ten, or hundred, examples of human baseness, stupidity, valour? Misanthropy, after all, should also have its limits. It’s enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga ( forced labour) is a Russian word, too. And it’s enough to discover on a turkish map somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called “Nigde” ( Russian for nowhere).” Joseph Brodsky, Essays

“As living information, the plasmate travels up the optic nerve of a human to the pineal body. It uses the human brain as a female host in which to replicate itself into its active form. This is an interspecies symbiosis. The Hermetic alchemists knew of it in theory from ancient texts, but could not duplicate it, since they could not locate the dormant, buried plasmate. Bruno suspected that the plasmate had been destroyed by the Empire; for hinting at this he was burned. “The Empire never ended.” Phillip K. Dick

“The person who is able to see but unable to hear is much more... troubled than the person who is able to hear but unable to see. There is something... characteristic of the big city. The interpersonal relationships of people in big cities are characterized by a markedly greater emphasis on the use of the eyes than on the ears. This can be attributed chiefly to the institution of public conveyance. Before buses, railways and trams became fully established during the 19C, people were never put in the position of having to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on end without exchanging a word.” Georg Simmel

“For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.To take a photograph is to hold one ́s breath when all faculties converge in a face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.To take a photograph means to recognize simultaneously and within a fraction of a second both the fact itself and the rigorous organisation of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one ́s head, one ́s eye, and one ́s heart on the same axis.” Cartier-Bresson

“Dear sir, I have safely received the recording of the “Birds of New Zealand”. It is marvellous! I particularly appreciated the exraordinary songs of the Tui, the Bellbird, the Riroriro (grey warbler), the Kiwi, the Kea, the wood-rail Weka, the Takahe (notornis) etc. etc. This present gives me immense pleasure. Thank you with all my heart! With very great gratitude. ” Olivier Messiaen

“Pac-Man kill screen is an area of deep controversy. Usually, the game just stops and goes blank. Occasionally, however, between one and eight additional levels will materialize, seemingly at random. Out there, the game breaks down, like the laws of physics in a black hole. There are upside-down mazes, blank boards, invisible ghosts. It was there, Billy told me in Florida, that he saw Pokey turn into Ms. Pac-Man herself, a disturbing collision of antipodes. “If I didn’t have pictures you’ wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “You’re somewhere you’re not supposed to be.” ” Joshuah Bearman

“And I think that whole business of control is very important. One wants to be in control of society, one wants to be in control of art. One wants to be in control, control, control. Now, just because the control is for something that’s on the good side, it’s still control. ... See, when you get into society, you see the big dilemma in society I think was expressed beautifully by Camus, where he says that one man, when he desires freedom, will be at the expense of others. In other words, one man’s freedom makes someone else a victim. You understand? And I feel the same way in music, that if you’re idealistic, and you insist that music be a certain way, then it’s at the expense of the music. If you use the music for means, then it becomes a polemical thing.” Morton Feldman

“”What can one transmit? How and to whom to transmit? These are questions that every person who has inherited from the tradition asks himself, because he inherits at the same time a kind of duty: to transmit that which he has himself received. “What part has research in a tradition? To what extent should a tradition of a work on oneself or to speak by analogy, of a yoga or of an inner life be at the same time an investigation, a research that takes with each generation a step ahead? “In a branch of Tibetan Buddhism it is said that a tradition can live if the new generation goes a fifth ahead in respect to the preceding generation, without forgetting or destroying its discoveries.” Grotowski

“Remember you cannot abandon what you do not know. To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself” Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” Feuerbach

: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom” David Foster Wallace

“Back in his van, we talk about what is known in classic-gaming argot as the “kill screen.” This is the edge of the universe, the place where instructions end. Billy has seen a lot of kill screens. Pac-Man comes to a halt at level 256, as the program runs out of code and the entire right side of the screen is engulfed by senseless symbols. Circus Charlie just freezes. Donkey Kong ends after five seconds on level 22. Then there is Galaga, which eventually closes in solitude. After everything comes nothing: No enemy armada. “No music. No score. Just you and the existential void. Other games end in violence. In BurgerTime, Billy says, the kill screen came at level 28, which he describes as the most chaotic moment he has ever experienced. The fried egg and hot dog and pickles chased him around so aggressively that Billy took it as a cruelly encoded joke. That did not prevent him from attempting to breach BurgerTime’s event horizon. Everyone said it was impossible, but he had to know: Is there more? With Pac-Man, there has always been a powerful appeal surrounding the notion of “The Doorway”-a prospective passageway to the other side, a way past level 256.”” Joshuah Bearman