utopia & reality / land of quotes

"It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)

"One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves."
— Martin Buber (Paths in Utopia)

"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)

"Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting."
— Robert Silverberg

"Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)

"A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
— Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."
— Anaïs Nin

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
— Philip K. Dick (I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon)

"Reality is frequently inaccurate."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them."
— Anaïs Nin

"Always remember, your focus determines your reality."
— George Lucas

"Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like."
— Laozi

"It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart."
— Haruki Murakami

esnek kalp ya da kalp bükülmesi / how much can a heart bend

elastikiyetin & hoşgörünün de bir sınırı var-mış

the "bend-ability" of the heart, too, has a limit after all

only who are as beautiful & generous & respectful & loving as my good friends will be welcome from now on

and to all those with neither respect nor empathy; who do not know how to share : goodbye

spend time with people with whome there is actually a dialogue, a mutual enrichment

this may be my new years resolution

"The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for."
Bob Marley

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
Oscar Wilde

wild thing

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,' Holly advised him. 'That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."
— Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories)

i love wild things.

i cant give my heart. i can only open my heart to let the wild in. and keep it open so that the wild thing is free. is free to leave. and free to come in. if it gives no damage inside; if it gives damage then the door will be closed next time. or the third time. i always give a second chance. but not a third. and yet there is no rule to matters of the heart. "the heart has reasons that reason cannot tell..."

when the wild thing leaves, the heart still remains. there is the emptiness left. an emptiness filled with enrichment. an enrichment that the wild thing introduced to the heart. and the heart that has introduced its own wild side to the wild thing.

i used to give my heart or try to keep wild things stay in my heart. that only brought a wrong feeling of possession. destruction. if u trap a wild thing, it will destroy your heart until it breaks it apart to flee.

love is a feeling just too far away from posession. it is an openness of the heart.

an openness. something closer to freedom.

and easier said than done, of course. i am practicing, indeed. we are, all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9DVJE_bhVU&feature=related

The Troggs - Wild Thing

human vs. inhuman

"The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye)..."
c.s. lewis

"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman."
camus

stories and other fragile things (always striving)

a fish about to slip back into the sea

suk; naschmarkt

on the way to semperdepot

karlsplatz, accidental rainbow, only on sunny days onlt at thr right angle

monument to the fly; october 2010; vienna; schillerplatz

"Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it."
*

"She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.

She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here."

*

"..It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill."
— Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things)

bent: towards the sun / vermisse die sonne

muısic for this post: Max Bruch – Kol Nidrei

"Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken."
Albert Camus

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
Rainer Maria Rilke

"I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible."
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

just to rival that one:

"...my heart was irrevocably gone."

Jane Austen (Love and Friendship)

"Goodbye, said the fox. And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

*

ICH VERMISSE DIE SONNE

courageous acts; the beauty of all that is vulnurable

3rd district; as snow melts

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

voyager and sea / 1, 2, 3: murakami

1

"It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart."

2

"Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear."

3

"For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?"

2 Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

3 Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

*

freeze, melt, evoparate

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

kurt vonnegut

"You don't know how hearts burn

For love that cannot live yet never dies

Until you've faced each dawn with sleepless eyes

You don't know what love is"

haydarpaşa train station - was burning today

heartache for the roof a building

"Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be."

agony over love (that is about to be wasted)

“Count your smiles instead of your tears; Count your courage instead of your fears.”

the night turns into yet another morning, as two peopleare seen in a conversation, walking along the streets in the 16th district.

they have just left the bar. they worked behind the counter at the bar at Cafe Bohem. I saw them. Making jokes, talking to people who asked for a drink or so.

at cafe bohem wa sthe party for celebrating the green-red coalition in wien.

12 hours later, she leaves with some linden tea in a nice glass container;

and with the stubborn capacity to still be able to love in the name of life and being alive;

she thinks that tears are romantic anarchists - turning all perception into a liquid state...

he is the one who is utterly sad; she is the one crying away the tears, listening to his pain: of not being able to be with the one he is in love with.

after talking for hours

like friends? like a therapist and the patient? like 2 stangers in a weird encounter?

she is exhausted. her eyelids drop in spite of the south park episodes that she would love to watch otherwise.

they sleep from 12 noon to 4 pm.

she can hear him sleep heavily together with his sadness. he is fast asleep; his pain trapped in his heart& mind; his pain fluttering.

she perceives his sadness; she perceives his love for this lady he talks about.

she hears that he is ready to basicly change anything in his life for this lady he talks about.

he is already now closing the refrigirator door after taking out a sandwich - just because she had warned her before not to leave the fridge door open for long... those are easy nuisances he is saying. he can do anything to win her heart.

she wakes up, feeling as if there is a sun behind the white of the curtain.

he wakes up; in pain; in agony; bothered; probably in love.

she perceives a heart that is fluttering. he is a trapped bird.

she understands perfectly how he is craving to convince this girl that it is a huge mistake not to see each other anymore...

she understands perfectly the ambivalance; the disaster of ambivalance, the tragedy of not knowing the reasons.

she watches him. she hears him. she feels him. helpless. he has such a clear idea for the 2 of them. for him, it is an "us" situtaion that should not be missed. she feels that this girl is in a single-in fear-in doubt state. yet in the girl's letter, she sounds so clear. so clear she almost envies her for being so clear in a letter.

she wonders how one is eager to end a relation whereas the other one is so eager to just continue.

something missing in the equation...

she thinks.

a million thoughts.

millions of associations.

she tries to stick to the moment.

to his facts.

she holds his head. his head is trapped in a certain kind of hopelessness.

how to heal.

she cannot comprehend the gap between this man's passion and this woman's decisiveness not to continue.

he is so nice she wants to cry. or he is so obsessed that she wants to run?

she takes a hot shower, singing tanita tikaram: the very very very sad truth is i never think sensibly...

she adores a being's capacity to love. with no reason.

she is an alien. but maybe he is also an alien after all.

she almost believes this. almost.

she adores the metaphor: he is left standing in the bus stop. and the bus is not coming...

is it about me? or is it about her? he asks... he believes that it is about her.

because he believes himself to be a cool guy; a perfect guy even.

she would never be bored if she was with him; that's what he says.

how he longs for this girl.

she watches him longing for this girl who is a phone call away.

she drinks a cup of linden tea; looking through books.

she already has anothe rappointment in the 3rd district.

he gets her a glass container - a jar.

she puts some linden in the glass containe.r

she puts the glass container in her bag.

she wishes him good luck.

and she leaves.

he turns on the light so that she does not fall down the stairs.

ah, she does not need eyes to see.

shut your eyes, and see.

"the very music i have heard inside your heart"