Adam Jensen Quotes

I’m so used to absolute freedom. I can shit anywhere. I can piss anywhere. I can take drugs. I can kill things. But in there I was nothing,” he says. “For the first time in my life I felt what Ned Kelly felt. The last month has been hell. I don’t think I was that mad. My own illness is news to me. They say that I’m borderline bipolar. That was odd – not to have the diagnosis but to swallow the diagnosis.

Admitting the need for help may also compound the survivor's sense of defeat. The therapists Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, who work with political refugees, describe the case of K, a torture survivor with severe post-traumatic symptoms who adamantly insisted that he had no psychological problems: "K...did not understand why he was to talk with a therapist. His problems were medical: the reason why he did not sleep at night was due to the pain in his legs and feet. He was asked by the therapist...about his political background, and K told him that he was a Marxist and that he had read about Freud and he did not believe in any of that stuff: how could his pain go away by talking to a therapist?

can …’ As I listened, I looked up at the white clouds drifting past. Finally, they had opened – it had started to snow – snowflakes were falling outside. I opened the window and reached out my hand. I caught a snowflake. I watched it disappear, vanish from my fingertip. I smiled. And I went to catch another one. Acknowledgements I’m hugely indebted to my agent, Sam Copeland, for making all this happen. And I’m especially grateful to my editors – Ben Willis in the United Kingdom and Ryan Doherty in the United States – for making the book so much better. I also want to thank Hal Jensen and Ivàn Fernandez Soto for their invaluable comments; Kate White for years of showing me how good therapy works; the young people and staff at Northgate and everything they taught me; Diane Medak for letting me use her house as a writing retreat; Uma Thurman and James Haslam for making me a better writer. And for all their helpful suggestions, and encouragement, Emily Holt, Victoria Holt, Vanessa Holt, Nedie Antoniades, and Joe Adams. Author Biography Alex Michaelides read English at Cambridge University and screenwriting at the American Film Institute. He wrote the film Devil You Know starring Rosamund Pike, and co-wrote The Con is On. His debut novel, The Silent Patient, is also being developed into a major motion picture, and has been sold in thirty-nine territories worldwide. Born in Cyprus to a Greek-Cypriot father and English mother, Michaelides now lives in London, England.

These stories, their parallel motifs, and related illuminations demonstrate not only a Christian fascination with the source of the sacred wood of the cross but also the firm conviction that it, as the wood upon which salvation was accomplished, must have been directly linked with the Edenic tree that figured in the fall and expulsion of humans from Paradise. In Hades, Adam can convey the good news to his descendants that the once-forbidden fruit has been transformed into life-giving food. That the tree of life should return to fulfill its original purpose completes the circuit of creation, loss, death, and resurrection.

In later renditions of the Life of Adam and Eve, the archangel Michael gives Seth a twig from the tree as a consolation prize, which he carries back to place on Adam’s grave. The twig grows up to be a lofty tree and, in time, is hewn down and becomes Christ’s cross. This legendary detail occurs in other early medieval stories. The long-standing tradition that the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, Golgotha, was so named because it was over the site of Adam’s grave gave this story a biblical basis.28 This is why a skull regularly appears at the base of the cross in Christian iconography of the crucifixion.

Bulletin a decade earlier, his definition of art: “It’s the only profession in the world where your employer wants you to die.” I think, in this strangely griefless church, it is perhaps the most honest description he gave of his career. I count up the art dealers in the room: there are four.

Adam almost never painted from life. His pictures were transcriptions. The text was harvested from popular culture, lifted from late-night television: phrases repeated aloud, over and over, until they had either shed or gained meaning. There was no judgement and little empathy.

the meaning of Adam’s work sat on its surface, that he had no opinion of his subjects, good or bad: “Cullen’s abjectness is not luxury at ease; his emptiness is not profundity; when he scribbles, his poor syntax is not a form of epigram. His crudeness is what it is – unabashed … He’s a bottom-feeder, none too pernickety about taste. Every pond needs one, especially the cesspools of popular culture.

Adam Cullen was a unique and larger-than-life figure in contemporary Australian art,” it began. “His public persona obscured to a certain extent his significant contribution to art practice … The pathos of his subject matter also has a form of abject beauty, the beauty of the decayed and coming apart, of a humanity that is to be found in failed endeavours, misunderstandings and missed connections.

With art, when you’re making something completely fucking useless, you can lose your sense of play. But for me everything is fun. If I lose that sense of play, I would just die or fade away. I love it because it’s so useless. It’s the most indulgent thing you can do, to make art. It’s so fucking selfish and I love it. I reckon I’m worth eight thousand dollars an hour, and the rest.