I didn’t live; I only survived.
I didn’t live; I only survived.
―
Atrona Grizel
When I enter a
restaurant, all the tables are out in the open. That is, if I sit at one,
everyone else can see how I eat and hear what I talk about. Why is this even
allowed? And it is not only in restaurants. In toilets, in vehicles, and even
in schools, it is the same. This condition: extreme visibility. At one time, I
imagined things like barriers inside vehicles that would separate people from
one another and toilet cabins that would be like capsules, letting nothing leak
from outside to inside or from inside to outside. They say innovation is born
this way, but I believe that innovation itself is fundamentally at odds with
the world.
―
Atrona Grizel
There should have
been a social system in which everyone hid something from everyone else,
because that would have added a bit of mystery to an otherwise tedious society.
In fact, this is still true even now, because everyone is a reputation-obsessed
liar, but since one does not live in a police state where people inform on one
another like in East Germany, this norm of identity secrecy is never openly
accepted. And this spares society from becoming a detective novel by a narrow
margin, instead turning it into a kind of grey performance machine.
―
Atrona Grizel
My loneliness
feels more like an ideological isolation rather than mere introversion.
―
Atrona Grizel
You can break me
not with criticism, but with love.
―
Atrona Grizel
My peers’ only
concern was to travel and have fun, while my only concern was to learn and
research. I chose thought over life, and then, by even changing the definition
of life with thought, I turned life into thought and thought into life.
―
Atrona Grizel
Only those with
sensitive hearts turn to hardness, because others do not need to build a
fortress to meticulously protect something that they do not have.
―
Atrona Grizel
Experiencing a
feeling doesn’t necessarily mean one has to be affected by it. If one is bored,
it doesn’t mean one needs to have fun. Or if one is happy, it doesn’t
automatically mean one should laugh. But since people equate living the feeling
with being under its influence, their inner world and outer behaviour become
the same, which makes them lose any sense of mystery.
―
Atrona Grizel
I can accept you
only by rejecting you. And in doing so, I express my respect for you through
the respect I have for your true self—the self you do not even respect—by
tearing it away from the being that has overtaken you, until only your essence
remains.
―
Atrona Grizel
A person who has
spent years subjected to dehumanizing treatment does not “lose their humanity”;
they transcend it, and in doing so, they become another kind of species.
―
Atrona Grizel
People have never
seen anyone like me before. They have sunk so deeply into sameness and come to
regard it as the only reality that they do not even know how to treat a
distinct species like me. I feel like they look at me the way they would at an
unseen animal in a zoo. And they settle for just looking, because, as I said:
they have never seen a creature like me before.
―
Atrona Grizel
People spend
their entire lives talking about football, astrology, food, work, and sex,
never deviating from these primal and concrete subjects, so I have every right
to obsessively revisit the conflict between the individual and society and the
incompatibility between the inner world and the outer world, addressing a new
detail each time. Society keeps repeating the same things endlessly? Then I
will constantly repeat my anti-society slogans. It will be a reciprocal loop.
If they weaponize sentences and send them at me, I will neutralize them,
reshape them, and send them back. The words they send to stab me will be cut
down from head to toe.
―
Atrona Grizel
I feel as if I
were a traveler who arrived either at the very beginning or the very end of
time—either millions of years before the emergence of existence or billions of
years after the shattering of the universe.
―
Atrona Grizel
Am I being
ignored to the point of invisibility? If so, I can do whatever I want. After
all, if nothing will come of it, it means I am free to do anything—not for a
result, but simply for its own sake.
―
Atrona Grizel
I pay attention
to two main things in people: Are they already “awake”? And if they are not,
are they “convertible” by me? When one’s perspective toward people is shaped
this way, one’s selectiveness follows a similar pattern. Anyone who does not
belong to either of these two categories becomes an intolerable
undesirable—practically an allergic reaction.
―
Atrona Grizel
Animals are, at
their root, nothing more than automatons.
―
Atrona Grizel
Friendship
obtained with a single click cannot be “friendship.”
―
Atrona Grizel
The only war that
can be waged for the sake of humanity is the war waged against humanity.
―
Atrona Grizel
Every readable
book that has been written whispers to the reader, as if saying, “Here, take
it, consume.” If a piece of writing has turned into a book and reached the
hands of a reader—meaning it has not only been written but also published and
shared with others—then the writer has a desire to be read, and that alone is
enough reason to approach the text with suspicion from the very beginning.
Seeing someone buried in a book disturbs me, as if it’s a sign of ignorance,
because they are doing exactly what the other side begs for. I never touch the
books on my bookshelf, and in this way, a certain air is created, as if saying:
“See? I am not reading you. You need me, but I do not need you. What will you
do about it?” And thus, the names of all those authors appear pitiful to me.
For they are dependent on the reader, and without the reader they lose all
their value. The quality of a piece of writing is revealed by how it appears
once all of its readers are removed. A text written for a crowd is bound not
only to that crowd but also enslaved to its era and its time. On the other
hand, writings cast into the void, addressed to no one, will endure their
existence for eternity. If only a single human being remained in the world, and
that person still produced volumes upon volumes of writing, that—indeed—would
be noble.
―
Atrona Grizel
The power that
the night bestowed upon me, if it were also with me during the day, could have
resolved everything of mine.
―
Atrona Grizel
I suppose that
the language of the universe is not mathematics and physics, but art and
philosophy. Mathematics describes, but art reveals. Physics predicts, but
philosophy wonders. The universe, in its rawest state, is not a formula but an
experience. It is not an answer to be solved; it is a mystery to be felt. To
truly understand the universe is not to study its structure but to feel its
silence. Those who know the universe more intimately are not astronauts or
astronomers, but mystics and dreamers.
―
Atrona Grizel
Those who cannot
read the language of night see the light of day not as tyranny, but as
happiness.
―
Atrona Grizel
“Self-help” books
prey on discontented people who feel disturbed by various but mainstream forms
of suffering—for example, “meaninglessness,” “uselessness,” “loneliness,” and
so on. Yet these feelings do not come from the person themselves; they are
created by society and then sold back to the person as something to be “fought”
against. In this way, society invents both the enemy and the ally, staging a
false conflict from which it profits. But a person whose dissatisfaction does
not lie with suffering itself, but rather with the refusal to accept loss and pain—in
other words, someone who finds peace and calm in carrying all these cursed
labels instead of being disturbed by them, someone different and
authentic—cannot be trapped by these methods. Consequently, such a person also
does not take seriously those propaganda books that command what to do and what
not to do.
―
Atrona Grizel
To “heal” or to
“improve” someone implies that the person is ill or flawed. Yet the human
spirit is not a wound to be “stitched,” nor a defective machine to be
“upgraded.” No “healing” ever truly occurs. To “improve” someone is a
superstition. For the self already encompasses all of these within itself,
beyond all forms of “good” and “evil.” The only thing that happens is an
endless transformation, but never a change.
―
Atrona Grizel
Those who do not
know are unaware that those who know are aware of the tedium of knowing.
― Atrona Grizel