Professor Thomas Sakoulas
State University of New York at Oneonta : Art : Courses

home> Quote Archive

The Quotes began as an innocent piece of Cyber-Art when I decided to surprise my students with a warning window that instead of error messages contained words of wisdom. I decided very soon to leave the window on the opening page but to replace the quote with a fresh one once a week.

I could have chosen any other format to present the quotes (new window, a banner, scrolling text, a hidden layer) but I am more attracted to the idea of presenting words in a context that is unexpected (the warning window), rather than just presenting quotes. Later, once the warning window lost its element of surprise it made more sense to place the quotes on a new pop-up window.

I replace the quotes randomly and I choose passages from books that had some impact over the way I live my life and do art.
I have no idea how long I will keep this piece going, but so far I actually enjoy going over books that I read long time ago just to find the few precious lines that I remember hiding there.

I will try to keep a running archive of all the quotes here just in case you missed any:

 

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

William Gibson
"Neuromancer"

"You exist only in what you do."

Federico Fellini

"So then, what we called 'sky' is not; 'love' is not; 'eternal' is not.
Things do not / Obey their names."

Odysseas Elytis
"Verb the Dark"

"...he began to let his mind wander, trailing his
fingers along the edge of an incomprehensible
computer bank. He reached out and pressed an
ivitighly large red button on a nearby panel.
The panel lit up with the words Please do not
press this button again."

Douglas Adams
"the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy"

"The power of words, their 'symbolic efficacy' is
greater when uttered in a void. When they have
neither context nor referent, they can take on the
power of a self-fulfilling (or self-defeating) prophecy.
Like the colour red of a fox's tail."

Jean Baudrillard
"Seduction"

"My head is not that clear.
But I think the great DiMaggio would be proud of me today.
I had no bone spurs. But the hands and the back hurt truly."
I wander what a bone spur is, he thought.
Maybe we have them without knowing of it.

Ernest Hemingway
"The Old Man and the Sea"

83
Shapes of all Sorts and Sizes, great and small,
That stood along the floor and by the wall;
And some loquacious Vessels were; and some
Listen'd perhaps, but never talk'd at all.

84
Said one among them--"Surely not in vain
"My substance of the common Earth was ta'en
"And to this Figure moulded, to be broke,
"Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again."

85
Then said a Second--"Ne'er a peevish Boy
"Would break the Bowl from which he drank in Joy;
"And He that with his hand the Vessel made
"Will surely not in after Wrath destroy."

86
After a momentary silence spake
Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make;
"They sneer at me for leaning all awry:
"What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?"

Edward FitzGerald
The Rubaáiyát of Omar Khayyaám

"... has ever anyone accused an artist who has painted a picture of not having drawn his inspiration form rules set up a priori? Has anyone ever asked, 'What painting ought he to make?' It is generally understood that there is no definite painting to be made, that the artist is engaged in the making of his painting, and that the painting to be made is precisely the painting he will have made. It is clearly understood that there are no a priori aesthetic values, but that there are values which appear subsequently in the coherence of the painting, in the correspondence between what the artist intended and the result. Nobody can tell what the painting of tomorrow will be like. Painting can be judged only after it has once been made."

Jean-Paul Sartre
"Essays in Existentialism"

"Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"one hundred years of solitude"

In the four thousand rooms of the Center the four thousand electric clocks simultaneously struck four.

Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World"

A world remains of which a man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.

Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"

 

And many a time Siddhartha even doubted whether this knowledge, this thought, was of such great value, whether it was not perhaps the childish self-flattery of thinkers, who were perhaps only thinking children.

Hermann Hesse, "Siddhartha"

"Good Morning," said the little Prince.
"Good Morning," said the railway switchman.
"What do you do here?" the little prince asked.
"I sort out travelers, in bundles of a thousand," said the switchman.
"I send off the trains that carry them: now to the right, now to the left."
And a brilliantly lighted express train shook the switchman's cabin as it rushed by with a roar like thunder.
"They are in a great hurry," said the little prince. "What are they looking for?"
"Not even the locomotive engineer knows that," said the switchman.
And a second brilliantly lighted express thundered by, in the opposite direction.
"Are they coming back already?" demanded the little prince.
"These are not the same ones," said the switchman. "It is an exchange."
"Where they not satisfied where they were?" asked the little prince.
"No one is ever satisfied where he is," said the switchman.
And they heard the roaring thunder of a third brilliantly lighted express.
"Are they pursuing the first travelers?" demanded the little prince.
"They are pursuing nothing at all," said the switchman.
"They are asleep in there, or if they are not asleep they are yawing. Only the children are flattening their noses against the windowpanes."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, "The little Prince"

The world abounds with superfluity... in these times we need desperately to clean, to disinfect. We have been surfeited by words, surfeited by images that have no reason to exist at all.

Fellini, "8 1/2"

And the crucial moment is that brutal instant which reveals that the journey has no end, that there is no longer any reason for it to come to and end.
Beyond a certain point it is movement itself that changes.

Jean Baudrillard, "America"

Everything is just as it was before: confusing!
I am not afraid of telling the truth, or admitting what I don't know, what I seek and I have not yet found.
Only this way I can feel alive. Please accept me as myself.

Fellini, "8 1/2"