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

weird & a little bit of strange / tuhaf ve biraz da garip?

"How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?"
Sylvia Plath

"You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity."
Rainer Maria Rilke

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating."
Pearl S. Buck

"Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play."
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world."
Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin)

"We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love."
Dr. Seuss

"There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion."
Edgar Allan Poe

that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent

arthur c-clark -- i really cropped this one out!

"Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously."
Tom Robbins

"...I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling."
Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"We all know interspecies romance is weird."
Tim Burton

"I'm not so weird to me."Haruki Murakami

"In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they're still beautiful."
Alice Walker

"I’ve always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something."
Tom Waits

"By a route obscure and lonely
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule --
From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE, out of TIME."
Edgar Allan Poe

"Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass."
D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

for some rivalry:

"Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."
Charles Mingus

"Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire.... Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help."
Charles Bukowski

"What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms."
— Kobayashi Issa

"You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?"
John Steinbeck (Sweet Thursday)

I often tried to get away from her and
she tied to get away from me
but it was difficult:
Cupid, in his strange way, was really
there."
Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

üzerinde şekiller bulunan kırmızı bir bez/ a red cloth with shapes on it

"city by mistake"... i decided to also go through some news. some situations that were born out of a mistake. but exposed the level of governement absence or government oppression. i am not sure how to call it. either government or hegemony. hegemony might be a better word.

wiki: Geographic hegemony

In The Production of Space (1992), Henri Lefebvre posits that geographic space is not a passive locus of social relations, but that it is trialectical — constituted by mental space, socialspace, and physical space — hence, hegemony is a spatial process influenced by geopolitics. In the ancient world, hydraulic despotism was established in the fertile river valleys ofEgypt, China, and Mesopotamia. In China, during the Warring States Era, the Qin State created the Chengkuo Canal for geopolitical advantage over its local rivals. In Eurasia, successor state hegemonies were established in the Middle East, using the sea (Greece) and the fringe lands (Persia, Arabia). European hegemony moved west-wards, to Rome, then north-wards, to the Holy Roman Empire of the Franks. At the Atlantic Ocean, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom established their hegemonic centres; in due course, geography dictated that the political poles then moved to the United States and the Soviet Union; to wit, geography can determine the long- and short-life of an hegemony, e.g. China's,Pax Sinica and the Roman Empire's Pax Romana in contrast to those of the Mongol Empire and Imperial Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere; (see Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Chantal Mouffe).

http://milli-tarih.blogspot.com/2010/07/ne-yaptn-hatice-teyze.html

15 Temmuz 2010 Perşembe

Ne yaptın Hatice teyze?

15 Temmuz 1969 tarihli Cumhuriyet gazetesinin haberine göre Kocamustafapaşa'daki bir balkonda çamaşır ipinde çamaşırlarla birlikte asılı orak-çekiçli Sovyet bayrağı “çevrede hayret uyandırmış”. Siyasi polisin gözaltına aldığı ev sahibi 67 yaşındaki Hatice K., ABD Konsolosluğu'nda ütücülük yaptığını, oradan kendisine verilen kullanılmış eşyalar arasından çıkan orak-çekiçli bayrağı tanımadığını söylemiş. Hatice K., “üzerinde şekiller bulunan kırmızı bir bez” diye tanımladığı bayrağı yıkayıp kestikten sonra kilim yapmayı düşündüğünü söylemiş.

Gramsci used the term hegemony to denote the predominance of one social class over others (e.g. bourgeois hegemony). This represents not only political and economic control, but also the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as 'common sense' and 'natural'. Commentators stress that this involves willing and active consent. Common sense, suggests Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, is 'the way a subordinate class lives its subordination' (cited in Alvarado & Boyd-Barrett 1992: 51).

However, unlike Althusser, Gramsci emphasizes struggle. He noted that 'common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself' (Gramsci, cited in Hall 1982: 73). As Fiske puts it, 'Consent must be constantly won and rewon, for people's material social experience constantly reminds them of the disadvantages of subordination and thus poses a threat to the dominant class... Hegemony... posits a constant contradiction between ideology and the social experience of the subordinate that makes this interface into an inevitable site of ideological struggle' (Fiske 1992: 291). References to the mass media in terms of an ideological 'site of struggle' are recurrent in the commentaries of those influenced by this perspective. Gramsci's stance involved a rejection of economism since it saw a struggle for ideological hegemony as a primary factor in radical change. (daniel chandler / marxist media theory)

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html

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