Shirin Neshat Quotes

I consider myself a natural optimist. I like the dark side of things.

Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and really, really, really beautiful and funny.

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

Everything I do is a reflection of the duality within me. Musically, I really love things that are very synthetic and unnatural. And I also like the organic and human... the intrinsic, I guess.

We live in the best place on earth but at times the worst.

My biggest failure is 'Metal Gear.' It's my biggest failure and my biggest success.

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression.

Even a sheet of paper has two sides.

Everybody's got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

My grandfather always sang about the light, and for some reason, I don't know why, it even goes back to when I was seven, eight years old, I've always been attracted to the dark.

I'm a child of extremes.

There are many who feel consciously hopeful and unconsciously hopeless, and there are few for whom it is the other way around.

I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

Oh, well...up until now it had been a good day, in a horrible kind of way.

She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both...Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both.

In a certain way, we're always toggling back and forth between the absolute and the relative, if that makes sense.

For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together

The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.

And the wind that saddens, the sea that gladdens, Are singing the selfsame strain.

Dusk is just an illusion because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are there cannot be one without the other yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel I remember wondering to be always together yet forever apart?

Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.

Black and white is how it should be, but shades of grey are the colors I see.

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?