Etel Adnan Quotes

Morning. Vast. Imprecision. Fog has covered everything in gray absolute. This has lasted. Doubt looms over the mind. Absence is harder to accept than death.

There are moments when the past ceases to be a form of the present. Rain and tears look alike.

Love in all its forms is the most important matter that we will ever face, but also the most dangerous, the most unpredictable, the most maddening. But it is also the only salvation I know of

لو كانت باريس سماً قاتلاً لشربت منه جرعة كبير بكل سرور ولأنهيت حياتي

يوجد العيد دائما حيث الشقاء مقيم

Dear soul, am I only because I have been?

In the green escape of my palace, over a bridge, under a canopy of opalescent light, through there, between dark branches and their shivering leaves, I'm lost in the scent of yellow roses, arrested by the range's filtering light.

The day is not made of light, but of will

Spring is dangerous, like love. And love survives the lovers.

Memory and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks and constantly merging. Both escape our will, though we depend on them. Measured but measured by whom or by what? The one is inside, the other, outside or so it seems, but is that true? Time seems also buried deep in us but where? Memory is right here, in the head, but it can exit, abandon that head, leave it behind, disappear. Memory, a sanctuary of infinite patience.

نحن البحر. نجزر ونفيض بلا انتظام

قلبي يضيق بالخوف من الآتي

Writing is drawing, drawing is writing. Because it's the same gesture. They're close already.

Eternity is non evident. There’s this endless rotation of the sun in the skull, the stillness outside, and a storm within. At least a river is always flowing in some part of the country. Winds, always gathering speed, shatter the order of things. We return home, in tears.

هل الغرض من النافذة أن تبقيك في الداخل، أو تفتح مداركك نحو الخارج؟

philosophy is a non-knowledge: thought takes pleasure in measuring its borders

It is a sentiment of tremendous truth and simplicity, yet tremendously difficult for the mind to metabolize — we remain material creatures, spiritually sundered by the fact of our borrowed atoms, which we will each return to the universe, to the stardust that made us, despite our best earthly efforts.

Morality is violence. An invisible violence at first. Love is a supreme violence, hidden deep in the darkness of our atoms. When a stream flows into a river, it’s love and it’s violence. When a cloud loses itself in the sky, it’s a marriage. When the roots of a tree split open a rock it’s the movement of life. When the sea rises and falls back only to rise again it’s the process of History. When a man and a woman find each other in the silence of the night, it’s the beginning of the end of the tribe’s power, and death itself becomes a challenge to the ascendancy of the group.

Silence is the creation of space, a space that memory needs to use . . . an incubator. We're dealing here with dimensions, stretching our inner muscles, pushing aside any interference. We're dealing with numbers, but not counting. Silence demands the nature of night, even in full day, it demands shadows.

desire intensifies on the silver edge of the sea. my friends, don’t wait for me any longer, my heart is in the abundance of the same spring as yours

they tell me there are four seasons but I live in a fifth one which is your space and your time

نشعر بالنشوة في أكثر المدن رداءة

احذر الكلمات. لأنه من السهل أن تغير معناها وتخلق سوء تفاهم معذباً

قد يكون قول الحقيقة أحياناً أذكى صيغة لإيصال المعلومات المغلوط فيها

هل للذاكرة قوانينها الخاصة فيها؟

لن نكون أبداً كما كنّا

Terror is our collective failure. Life is nature's triumph.

Beauty, it's an inner sense, and it makes us happy. It's not complicated, we need it.

It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am.

ثمّة أشكال سلبية للسعادة

عدم الاكتمال رذيلة حذقة

دعونا لا نغذي الخيال بأمور تتعلق بالصداقة

Their women only exert indirect powers over them, powers that seem ineffective, or else are so strong that they, the men, can’t recognize them as such. But a woman who stands up to them and looks them in the eye is a tree to be cut down, and they cut it down. She falls with the sound of dead wood which disappears among the perfidious murmurings of the city, and to the smirking of other women who are satisfied with the male victories.

Words melt in reflections; that’s why there’s a uselessness to this night, to my missing the river, to the delaying of love... light is picking up momentum in the vicinity of the oaks that cover this property, this silence.

My breathing is a tide. Love doesn’t die.

laziness-with it's inebriating effects- is the wine of the poor, and of those who wander among them

Night is an element of love; like fog. It liberates space, lets freshness cross it. Its magic elevates the body, brings to the surface the mystery of just being alive, being. With or without stars and galaxies, the sky becomes a private territory—the imagination’s own scope. These are moments when one reaches all there is between the moon and oneself. — Etel Adnan, Etel Adnan: on Love and the Cost We Are Not Willing to Pay Today (Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Co KG, 2011)

Everyone lives Time. If then one added every second lived by each of these people, lived by each of us, by all the people of the world, at this precise moment, it would make all the eternity of Time.

to the West the trains are falling apart like Marilyn Monroe

La mort n'est jamais au pluriel. N'exagérons pas sa victoire. Cette dernière est suffisamment totale. Ne la chantons pas cette victoire. Il n'y a pas de millions de morts. Il arrive des millions de fois que quelqu'un meure.

Il y a plus de deux cents bateaux dans le port qui attendent de décharger leurs marchandises et comme ils sont tout allumés, les nuits, Beyrouth a l'air de s'être déplacé, d'avoir glissé sur la mer.