Liudvika Sonia Koort > Liudvika's Quotes

“The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

“Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.”
― Gaston Bachelard

“For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimacy. All art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, each work is the implementation of this original fault, from which comes a risky plenitude and new light.”
― Maurice Blanchot

“The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

“Death, in the human perspective, is not a given, it must be achieved. It is a task, one which we take up actively, one which becomes the source of our activity and mastery. Man dies, that is nothing. But man is, starting from his death. He ties himself tight to his death with a tie of which he is the judge. He makes his death; he makes himself mortal and in this way gives himself the power of a maker and gives to what he makes its meaning and its truth. The decision to be without being is possibility itself: the possibility of death.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

“Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

“The authentic answer is always the question’s vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open.”
― Maurice Blanchot

“And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space," Milosz writes, "I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night's own solitude in a universe without end!" And the poet continues this love duet between dreamer and world, making man and the world into two wedded creatures that are paradoxically united in the dialogue of their solitude.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“All sins are attempts to fill voids.”
― Simone Weil

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”
― Roland Barthes

“If a woman sleeps alone it puts a shame on all men. God has a very big heart, but there is one sin He will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade. The university lectures that I had found pretty impressive on first hearing, have faded away. Now I am listening to one on Pirandello. Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I’ve seen recently — they have already faded. Authors of thousands of books I’ve read... All that remains are the colours of their bindings, their covers. I don’t remember much about Beauty and the Beast, but I remember clearly, vividly the hear of the day as we were crossing the Rhine bridge, to see the film. Everything that I see, or red, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors. No, I am not a novelist. No precision of observation, detail. With me, everything is mood, mood, or else —simply nothingness.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go

“Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.”
― W.B. Yeats, Poetry, Drama and Prose

“A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him up for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.”
― W.B. Yeats

“We danced our youth in a dreamed of city, Venice, paradise, proud and pretty, We lived for love and lust and beauty, Pleasure then our only duty. Floating them twixt heaven and Earth And drank on plenties blessed mirth We thought ourselves eternal then, Our glory sealed by God’s own pen. But paradise, we found is always frail, Against man’s fear will always fail. ”
― Veronica Franco