"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

"The future, Madame, is something we should have started on a long time ago." 

"He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window."

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

"It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience."

"Take me, subtract movies and you get zero."

"We know that under the image revealed there is another which is truer to reality and under this image still another and yet again still another under this last one, right down to the true image of that reality, absolute, mysterious, which no one will ever see or perhaps right down to the decomposition of any image, of any reality."

Michelangelo Antonioni
(29/09/1912 – 30/07/2007) 

"But I think that films should be made not for the audience or to make money or to attain popularity. In my opinion, films should be made to be as good as they can be. And this, it seems to me, is the best way to work and be sincere."

Michelangelo Antonioni
(29/09/1912 – 30/07/2007) 

"I don't know, I think I'd like to tell them only this, to know how to find themselves more often alone - to enjoy being alone with themselves more frequently. I think the tragedy of today's youth is that they try to unite on the basis some noisy events, a couple even violent, and this desire to unite in order not not to be alone is an unpleasant condition, from my point of view. I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you're by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when he is alone, it seems to me, is a person in danger."

"The immense sadness of films without woman. I hate war films, except for the moment when the soldier takes out of his pocket the photo of a woman."

"The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed."

"I'm convinced we all are voyeurs. It's part of the detective thing. We want to know secrets and we want to know what goes on behind those windows. And not in a way that we would use to hurt anyone. There's an entertainment value to it, but at the same time we want to know: What do humans do? Do they do the same things as I do? It's a gaining of some sort of knowledge, I think."


"(...) I think people are fascinated by that, by being able to see into a world they couldn't visit. That's the fantastic thing about cinema, everybody can be a voyeur. Voyeurism is a bit like watching television - go one step further and you want to start looking in on things that are really happening."

"To be silent; to be alone. All the being and doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Beneath it all is dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by."

"Perhaps I seek certain utopian things, space for human honour and respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes. Very few people seek these images today."

"(...) 'Um quarto está ceifando, e esse sou eu.'
Vem isto tudo, que vai dito como vai sentido, a propósito do grande cansaço, aparentemente sem causa, que desceu hoje súbito sobre mim. Estou não só cansado, mas amargurado, e a amargura é incógnita também. Estou, de angustiado, à beira de lágrimas — não de lágrimas que se choram, mas que se reprimem, lágrimas de uma doença da alma, que não de uma dor sensível.
Tanto tenho vivido sem ter vivido! Tanto tenho pensado sem ter pensado! Pesam sobre mim mundos de violências paradas, de aventuras tidas sem movimento. Estou farto do que nunca tive nem terei, tediento de deuses por existir. Trago comigo as feridas de todas as batalhas que evitei. Meu corpo muscular está moído do esforço que nem pensei em fazer.
Baço, mudo, nulo… O céu ao alto é de um verão morto, imperfeito. Olho-o como se ele ali não estivesse. Durmo o que penso, estou deitado andando, sofro sem sentir. A minha grande nostalgia é de nada, é nada, como o céu alto que não vejo, e que estou fitando impessoalmente."

"- I feel my eyes tearing up. What should I do with my eyes? What should I watch? 
- You ask what you should watch. I ask how I should live. It's the same thing."

"I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent."

"Que é necessário sair da ilha para ver a ilha, que não nos vemos se não nos saímos de nós"

"Invisible things are the only realities."

"...he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death."

Chris Marker (1921-2012)

"(...) I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange."

"Talvez por muito tempo, você ainda pode continuar a mentir para si mesmo, matando seus sentidos. Mas o jogo acabou. O mundo mudou, mas você não. Indiferença não lhe fez qualquer diferença. Você não está morto. Você não enlouqueceu. Não há maldição que paira sobre você (...) Tempo, que tudo vê, tem proporcionado a solução, apesar de si mesmo. O tempo, que sabe a resposta, continua a fluir. É um dia como este, um pouco mais tarde, um pouco mais cedo, que tudo começa de novo, que tudo começa, que tudo continua. Pare de falar como um homem em um sonho. Olhe! Veja aquilo! (...) Não, você não é o mestre anônimo do mundo."

"O cinema não é um ofício. É uma arte. Não é um trabalho de equipe. O diretor está só diante de uma página em branco. Para Bergman estar só é se fazer perguntas; filmar é encontrar as respostas. Nada poderia ser mais classicamente romântico."

"everything burns when nobody is looking."

"- I'm not daydreaming. 
- Right. You're not daydreaming. You're sleepwalking."

"The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like like disaster."

"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact."

"Sometimes everything seems just like a dream. It’s not my dream, but someone else’s, that I have to participate in. What happens when the one who dreamt us wakes up and feels ashamed ?"

"Myself I must remake."

"And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants. He should know by instinct, grounded in experience, what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft, light or dark treatment." 

"Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire.... Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help."

"i can tell a great picture, but it it very rarely that i identify so much with someone's style (a process literally soothing) -yours is so strong through its subtlety, sort of impressionistic, hermetic and a bit outlandish and highly emotional and i guess one could go on and on searching for accurate adjectives, but then the whole thing would turn to self‐referentiality, wouldn't it?.
i tend to believe that apart from the phenomenal world what a photographer captures is their own soul. sounds a bit tacky, i know, but persistence in subjects, persistence in the way one chooses to portray reality more or less indicates the individual's effort to express itself and decode itself and communicate itself and so on.
concluding all this mumbling of mine, your photographs made me happy and while i watched them, the world felt less of an insecure place. i now was less alone."

"Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps."

"An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex."

"There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."

"Every breaking away from the conventional, dead, official cinema is a healthy sign. We need less perfect but more free films. If only our younger film makers – I have no hopes for the old generation – would really break loose, completely loose, out of themselves, wildly, anarchically! There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses."

"Cada plano isolado vale por um filme, é um filme. Foi assim que a história do cinema começou. Lumière: O almoço do bebê é uma cena simples, a mulher e a criança; por trás, as folhas das árvores se movem. Existe um equilíbrio entre os galhos que se movem e a historinha em primeiro plano. Este equilíbrio é o melhor de tudo. Cada parte da imagem vive, independentemente, e isto é bom de ver. A indústria do cinema procura exatamente eliminar este equilíbrio. Se você elimina a historinha contada num filme convencional, as imagens se tornam absurdas, sem vida. Se você elimina a historinha de qualquer de meus filmes, ou a historinha contada num filme de Dovjenko, ou nos filmes de vários outros como nós, restará sempre um jardim de imagens. E, tal como num jardim as imagens não precisam formar um conceito claro. Você nem precisa entendê-las, basta fazer o que se faz num jardim: caminhar, caminhar entre elas"

"But here’s the thing
 I am not there
I have fallen to misty pieces
yet you attempt to name and embed me."

"I suppose I give as much as I want to give. I decide immediately if I like a person and if I do, then I'm myself, and if I don't, then I give nothing. (...) But people do have completely the wrong idea about me, almost the opposite, in fact. And I'm quite happy for it to be like that. Do I want loads of people to know who I am? I'd much rather they didn't have a clue."

"Talkies substituted passive participation instead of the deeper state of active communion that silence encouraged."

"(...) I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.”

"Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored. In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete."

"The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of."

"I see only one common point shared by young directors: we all play pinball while older directors drink scotch and play cards."

"It’s good to be free; for then you can sleep and let desire and malaise follow each other without caring what happens. I’m going to become completely rusty."

"Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them."

"But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths." 

"'Como todo mundo, sinto necessidade da família e dos amigos, de afeto e contatos amigáveis. Não sou feito de pedra ou de ferro, como um hidrante ou um poste.'
Talvez seja isto o que realmente conta: chegar ao cerne do sentimento humano, apesar das evidências."