Marina Abramovic Quotes

Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.

I'm a whole lot more than just Spanish or Irish or whatever, but definitely, it's given me help. It's given me a push, and I'm very proud of my Spanish heritage.

Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.

I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.

The risk a lot of times, in my mind - and I may be incorrect - the risk of challenging people directly with their beliefs is that society is such that there's too many of us, so a direct challenge automatically engages people's defenses.

Yes, I was a bully. But the scrapping on the streets was my way of dealing with the anger I felt towards my parents.

For the last 14 years or so, I've been a fighter for so long I kind of forgot what it's like to not have this as my biggest form of expression of who I am.

There was a lot of aggression in me. It comes from my Bihari roots, I guess.

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.

I remember in junior high school, which is what we called it, suddenly I was looking at myself, almost through other people's eyes, and thought: how does the world see me? So that was one of the things I was really interested in, when I was writing Goodbye Stranger.

Other people's deconstruction of your motivations doesn't help you do what you do. You can't swallow and think about swallowing at the same time.

There's a booming, rotating, never sleeping city in the center of my brain and no body can come in and I can't escape. I have a strange sense of pride that my brain works that way, but I'm also terrified of what would happen if I ever tried to think in another way.

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That's why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder.

After looking at Salomaybe, I don't know who the hell the real me is. I think it's closest now to the real me because for one thing, I'm used to this.

No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.

The music we listen to may not define who we are. But it’s a damn good start.

I think Dexter is a man who ... a part of himself is very much frozen, or arrested in a place that is pre-memory, pre-conscious, pre-verbal. Something very traumatic happened to him, he doesn't know what that is. And I think on some level he wants to know. He denies his humanity, he describes himself as someone who is without feeling, and yet I think that he maybe suspects - in a way that maybe isn't even conscious yet when we first meet him - that he is in fact a human being.

I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.

How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.

Not doubt, certainty is what drives one insane.

As long as we believe our thoughts, there will always be war.

Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

Nothing is quite so horrifying and paralyzing as to win the Oedipal struggle and to be awarded your mother as the prize.

Oh, no. I don't think I've ever really subscribed to that view, that you can turn it on and off like a water tap. Um, you know, I think that there's a whole lot that goes into the makeup of an individual that, uh, you just can't simply say, oh, like, "Tomorrow morning I'm gonna stop being gay." It's like saying, "Tomorrow morning I'm gonna stop being black."

Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.