Andy Jay > Andy's Quotes

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
― Alan Watts

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
― Ansel Adams

“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“silence is the language of god,
all else is poor translation.”
― Rumi

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
― Robert Frost

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots

“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

“Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.”
― Werner Herzog

“I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.”
― Federico Fellini

“you must wear it like she wears disappointment on her face
you must hide the surprise of tasting other men on your lips
your mother is a woman and women like her cannot be contained.

you find the black tube inside her beauty case, where she keeps
your fathers old prison letters,
you desperately want to look like her
film star beauty, you hold your hand against your throat
your mother was most beautiful when sprawled out on the floor
half naked and bleeding.

you go to the bathroom to apply the lipstick,
somewhere no one can find you
your teeth look brittle against the deep red slickness
you smile like an infant, your mouth is a wound
you look nothing like your mother
you look everything like your mother.

you call your ex boyfriend, sit on the toilet seat and listen to
the phone ring, when he picks up you say his name slow
he says i thought i told you to stop calling me
you lick your lips, you taste like years of being alone.”
― Warsan Shire

“We love films because they makes us feel something. They speak to our desires, which are never small. They allow us to escape and to dream and to gaze into the eyes that are impossibly beautiful and huge. They fill us with longing. But also. They tell us to remember; they remind us of life. Remember, they say, how much it hurts to have your heart broken.”
― Nina LaCour, Everything Leads to You

“To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”
― Ansel Adams

“I'm oxygen and he's dying to breathe.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“I placed no trust in faiths, doctrines, ideologies, institutions. Thus I could stand only upon my own feet. But I was a Pole, molded by Polishness, living in Poland. And so I needed to look deeper for my ‘self,’ in the place where it was no longer Polish but simply human”
― Witold Gombrowicz

“She is you, she is your mother, your father, your country. She is Poland.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea

“MY WOMAN

My woman came with me as far as Brest,
she got off the train and stayed on the platform,
she grew smaller and smaller,
she became a kernel of wheat in the infinite blue,
then all I could see were the tracks.

Then she called out from Poland, but I couldn't answer,
I couldn't ask, "Where are you, my rose, where are you?"
"Come," she said, but I couldn't reach her,
the train was going like it would never stop,
I was choking with grief.

Then patches of snow were rotting on sandy earth,
and suddenly I knew my woman was watching :
"Did you forget me," she asked, "did you forget me?"
Spring marched with muddy bare feet on the sky.

Then stars lighted on the telegraph wires,
darkness dashed the train like rain,
my woman stood under the telegraph poles,
her heart pounding as if she were in my arms,
the poles kept disappearing, she didn't move,
the train was going like it would never stop,
I was choking with grief.

Then suddenly I knew I'd been on that train for years
- I'm still amazed at how or why I knew it -
and always singing the same great song of hope,
I'm forever leaving the cities and women I love,
and carrying my losses like wounds opening inside me,
I'm getting closer, closer to somewhere.”
― Nazim Hikmet

“Who doesn’t respect and value his past, is not worth the honour of the present, and has no right to a future.”
― Józef Piłsudski