an exercise in not forgetting

travel, quotes, and 35mm film (IG: @june_ette)

[emotional-algebra]

This is the art of courage: to see things as they are and still believe that the victory lies not with those who avoid the bad, but those who taste, in living awareness, every drop of the good.

Victoria Lincoln (via emotional-algebra)

[june-ette]

queenstown, new zealand. 2016 [35mm film]

[june-ette]

queenstown, new zealand. 2016 [35mm film]

[june-ette]

14. Why do we need a new spirituality in art? Because connecting in a meaningful way is what makes people happy. Being understood and understanding each other makes life enjoyable and worth living.

Remodernist Manifesto, Billy Childish & Charles Thomson

[quotemadness]

I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it’s not like that. It happens overnight.

Haruki Murakami (via quotemadness)

[june-ette]

queenstown, new zealand. 2016 [35mm film]

[june-ette]

turning twenty one in the middle of winter

queenstown, new zealand. 2016 [35mm film]

[june-ette]

“You begin to liquidate a people.” Hübl said, “by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster.”

“And the language?”

“Why bother taking it away? It will become a mere folklore and sooner or later die a natural death.”

- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera 

[june-ette]

“That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not yet stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles.”

- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

[june-ette]

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

[june-ette]

The time of Kafka's novel is the time of a humanity that has lost its continuity with humanity, of a humanity that no longer remembers anything and lives in cities without names where the streets are without names or with names different from those they had yesterday, because a name is continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

[june-ette]

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

[june-ette]

That is the secret of poetry. We consume ourselves in the beloved woman, we consume ourselves in the idea we believe, we burn in the landscape we are moved by.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

[june-ette]

Living art draws its life from the surrounding environment. Our forebears drew their artistic inspiration from a religious atmosphere which fed their souls; in the same way we must breathe in the tangible miracles of contemporary life - the iron network of speedy communications which envelops the earth, the transatlantic liners, the dreadnoughts, those marvellous flights which furrow our skies, the profound courage of our submarine navigators and the spasmodic struggle to conquer the unknown.

Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, Umberto Boccioni et al.

[june-ette]

That is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde