Quotes from Hallucinating Foucault

“The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“All writers are, somewhere or other, mad. Not les grands fous, like Rimbaud, but mad, yes, mad. Because we do not believe in the stability of reality. We know that it can fragment, like a sheet of glass or a car's windscreen. but we also know that reality can be invented, reordered, constructed, remade. Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“Well -- there are two kinds of loneliness, aren't there? There's the loneliness of absolute solitude -- the physical fact of living alone, working alone, as I have always done. This need not be painful. For many writers it's necessary. Others need a female staff of family servants to type their bloody books and keep the their egos afloat. Being alone for most of the day means that you listen to different rhythms, which are not determined by other people. I think it's better so. But there is another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure....And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass. They reassure themselves with conformity, with carefully constructed resemblances. You are masked, aware of your absolute difference.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“We articulate our fears, like children in the dark, giving them names in order to tame them.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“The love between writer and a reader is never celebrated. It can never be proved to exist. But he was the man I loved most. He was the reader for whom I wrote.

That’s what my writing was. Messages in bottles.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“Ja pričam priče. Mi svi izmišljamo priče. Pričat ću ti priče koje će te nasmijati. Volim da te gledam kako se smiješ. Nikad neću pobjeći iz ovog zatvora beskrajnih priča.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“Sav svoj novac je trošila na kupovinu knjiga, a sve vrijeme na njihovo čitanje. Sve su bile ispisane kritikama, odgovorima na marginama, ponekad su među njih bile umetnute čitave stranice komentara. Šunjala se kroz stoljeća pisanja, ostavljajući svoj znak kud god bi išla.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant king? O Fool, I shall go mad.
Maybe madness is the excess of possibility,.... And writingis about reducing possibility to ne idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud -- and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don't harbour any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“Svi pisci su, na jedan ili drugi način, ludi. Jer mi ne vjerujemo u stabilnost stvarnosti. Mi znamo da se ona može raspasti kao komad stakla ili šoferšajba na autu. Ali mi također znamo da stvarnost može biti ponovo izmišljena, može joj se promijeniti redoslijed, može se izgraditi, ponovo napraviti. Pisanje je, samo po sebi, čin nasilja počinjenog protiv stvarnosti. Zar ne misliš i ti tako, petit? Mi to uradimo, ostavimo napisano, i iskrademo se neprimjetno...”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“Kao pobijeđeni revolucionar napustila je svoje seksualne barikade. Nešto se u njoj slomilo, nježno, tiho i nevoljko, i zagnjurila je lice u udubljenje između mog ramena i uha, ne opirući se. Bio sam veoma uznemiren njenom neobičnom nježnošću i tiho sam joj pričao ni o čemu naročitom dok nije zaspala u mom naručju.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“I stared at the changing patterns on the back of his white shirt as he moved under the trees.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“But...if it's so awful and difficult who not try to become a group? Be accepted?

He glittered at me for a moment, then said, I would rather be mad.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“Ludilo i strast su se uvijek izmjenjivali. Kroz cijelu zapadnu književnu tradiciju. Ludilo je obilje egzistencije. Ludilo je način postavljanja teških pitanja.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“Excess is essential to the production of austerity.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

“Maybe when you care, terribly, painfully, about the shape of the world, and you desire nothing but absolute, radical change, you protect yourself with abstraction, distance.”
― Patricia Duncker, quote from Hallucinating Foucault

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Popular quotes

“When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream.
A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but isn’t me, is happy as she steps out of the car with her daddy. They enter the castle and go down the steps to the dungeon where people move like shadows in the glow of burning candles. There are carpets and funny pictures on the walls. Some of the people wear hoods and robes. Sometimes they chant in droning voices that make the little girl afraid. There are other children, some of them without any clothes on. There is an altar like the altar in nearby St Mildred’s Church. The children take turns lying on that altar so the people, mostly men, but a few women, can kiss and lick their private parts. The daddy holds the hand of the little girl tightly. She looks up at him and he smiles. The little girl likes going out with her daddy.
I did want to tell Dr Purvis these dreams but I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, and so kept them to myself. The psychiatrist was wiser than I appreciated at the time; sixteen-year-olds imagine they are cleverer than they really are. Dr Purvis knew I had suffered psychological damage as a child, that’s why she kept making a fresh appointment week after week. But I was unable to give her the tools and clues to find out exactly what had happened.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind

“No deseo nada aunque lo deseo todo.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin

“In those days, I didn't understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contradictory! But I was too young to know how to love her.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz

“Principles of design:
1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.
2. Simplify the structure of tasks.
3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation.
4. Get the mappings right.
5. Exploit the power of constraints.
6. Design for error.
7. When all else fails, standardize.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Revised)

“I'm a big fan of pastries the size of a baby that contain enough calories for a year. That seems like an effective use of time.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

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