Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

He had the same empty confusion in his eyes that I saw in my mirror every morning, that odd sort of denial that only seems to come when the world decides to jump the rails without warning you first.

Most of my life, I feel I have been Unicycling at the Edge of the Abyss! If fact, this will be the name of my book if I ever write one, or a one man stand up routine. I have used it as the name of a collection of my musical compositions written during the '90s. It fits the scary journey I feel I've been on.

My life used to be like that game of freeze tag we played as kids. Once tagged, you had to freeze in the position you were in. Whenever something happened, I'd freeze like a statue, too afraid of moving the wrong way, of making the wrong decision. The problem is, if you stand still too long, that's your decision.

The crimes that become iconic etch themselves into the collective consciousness because they suggest a frightening truth: that the universe does not rely on cause and effect.

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.

Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.

I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me.

All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.

But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.

We are going through a terrible crisis. We do not know exactly what is going to happen, but in our hearts the pendulum of the seismograph is already swinging.

You see the problem of an unstable White House from the outside and worry about it. But from the inside, it is 50 times worse.

People are tired of constant movement, improvisation, and wild scrambling when plans fail.

We live in a crazy world. You don't know what's going to happen.

Some people are just weird when you're on a plane - it's the same during a renovation. It stresses them out.

Terror?often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.

The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.

I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.

The fear of death in the one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place.

He asked himself those some questions too many times and felt the fears again that kept him where he was

Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.

War always takes you by surprise.

Businesses are terrified. They have no idea what I'm going to do next.