Shirin Neshat Quotes

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.

It's probably an intellectual weakness, but I look at the stars, and I say, 'There's something bigger than us out there.'

At the end of the day, one of the biggest misconceptions of Ghost is that it's just about the devil. It's always been about mankind and living.

Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.

There are only two things to write about: life and death.

Poetry will exist as long as there is a problem of life and death

Odd how clear it suddenly became, once a person had died, that the body was the very least of him.

Life's something we already understand. Death is a mystery.

We are all students of the world; frail embodied consciousnesses struggling to understand, and be a meaningful part of this great, mysterious gift of life.

Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be.

A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human"?

The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.

There's no victory-condition for being human.

People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.

People no longer try to decipher the mystery of life but choose instead to be a part of it.

Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life - ''possessive'', even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life, only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.

He rose and turned toward the lights of town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

Life is not measured by the time we live.

This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's.

If you are not astonished that you exist, your humanity is not complete.

Often I say to myself "Really, what are we doing on this planet?" We are passing the message as well as we can, communicating our fears, our hopes ... Day in day out, week after week and year after year, people kill each other.

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.