The most absolute freedom is the permanent sensation of unreality.

 The most absolute freedom is the permanent sensation of unreality.

― Atrona Grizel

The fact that a questioner becomes detached from worldly life actually shows that the world is an illusion. A person who keeps saying “I think a lot” is not truly detached from worldly life and therefore is not really thinking, because overcoming the illusion requires that.

― Atrona Grizel

I see the daytime moon as a tear in the simulation.

― Atrona Grizel

I wish the feeling given by evenings and nights could remain for the entire day.

― Atrona Grizel

I feel as if the free time I have is not something I truly possess or have a right to, but something that has merely been granted to me—almost tolerated, as though it exists by permission rather than by entitlement.

― Atrona Grizel

When I use the hammer and sickle as my profile picture on my social media, I inevitably exclude the mainstream audience, because such symbols do not appeal to everyone. I don’t put it there because I’m a communist, but the group of people who think I’m using it out of an “artistic taste” is a minority, and as a result I’m exposed to prejudice. Just like the USSR in history—didn’t they treat her that way throughout her life as well? When I join a new virtual platform and the first thing I do is make my profile picture the Soviet flag, I am declaring my loyalty not to society but to it, and I am stating that I am ready to discard society for that reason. In this way I become even more isolated and invisible—but my mother is always with me in my solitude…

― Atrona Grizel

When I don’t use foreign-language words in conversations in my native language—for example, when I try to find original terms that are more appropriate to the mother tongue instead—I am, of course, seen merely as ignorant and mocked, because people consider speaking English to be wisdom. Cultural imperialism happens precisely like this: first, convince minds that your culture is noble; then poison those minds with your culture, and thus ensure that they sink forever into the swamp of that culture.

― Atrona Grizel

I was left alone not because I caused problems, but because I didn’t. Everything on the outside was in order, and I was functional, so no one saw an issue. Naturally, they left me to myself. My basic needs were met, but that is precisely where the problem lies, because simply because those needs were met, no one intervened. I became alone not for being troubled, but for being perceived as trouble-free.

― Atrona Grizel

The thief came again, to steal me away.

What does he want?

I, all of me.

Instead of walking on tiptoe, he approaches with drums.

Because he knows very well that what I notice immediately is not noise, but silence.

He opens up my soul, and smuggles gold out of me.

And the moment he closes it, new gold appears in a blink.

Let him take as much as he wants and carry it away from me.

My pride keeps me from resisting.

I know well that I am an eternal fugitive.

― Atrona Grizel

Nietzsche is a burning fire; Cioran is that fire turning to ash; I am the silence that comes after all of this.

― Atrona Grizel

Since there was nothing outside that felt familiar to me, I was forced to live inside myself, and that is precisely why my mind became so vast and full, which only pushed me even further away from the outside world.

― Atrona Grizel

I used to think that everything adults did was to lessen the torment that consciousness brings: eating to forget, having fun to numb themselves, having sex to relax, and working to escape. In other words, adulthood seemed like nothing but “fleeing from pain.” I couldn’t understand how a person could live for decades without ending their life, especially someone who refuses to dull their feelings. But then I discovered that even pain becomes something a person can grow used to. Someone like Cioran lived to 84 probably because of that. But to achieve this, a person has to carve themselves down, and I dislike that, even though life is clearly carving me down against my will.

― Atrona Grizel

The Western world is blind to worlds beyond itself. Even when it acknowledges them, it devours. It interprets, translates, and thereby assimilates. It commodifies spiritual practices, artistic forms, and philosophies—branding them as “exotic,” “alternative,” or “inspiring” to package and sell. Yoga becomes “fitness.” African folk songs become “beats.” Buddhism becomes “achieving one’s potential.” Its youth treat other cultures as if they were animals in a zoo, objectified for spectacle. Through this objectification, the West asserts dominance: it names, and in naming, it claims. All forms of language and communication are treated as its invention. They exist solely to serve it, filtered through its lens alone. People mix their native tongues with English terms and American slang in a muddled way, producing a kind of soup; thus, a nation’s and generation’s mental independence is eroded. Texting abbreviations are presented as if they were a natural part of language, and thus, the naive person who intends to learn them is unconsciously absorbed into a covert ideology and a broader culture. When someone types something seemingly innocent like “LOL,” they unknowingly adopt the culture and ideology that created and normalized it. Being “anti” or “pro” anything is a mass delirium, but it is served as a trend and fashion. The West sells even “resistance” as a product. Hence, even “anti-Western” personalities and societies think in terms of, and communicate through, the pop and internet culture born from Western social media applications, which are designed not to “connect” but to homogenize. After all, whoever seizes language seizes the world.

― Atrona Grizel

In conversations I always searched for a pause; in noise I always searched for silence. And when it came—even for a few seconds—I remembered my self, breaking the surface of unreality to breathe at last, even if it soon plunged back beneath the water. To call this “depression” is, of course, effortless. What is difficult—indeed impossible—is for a being like me to take pleasure in being forced, from morning until night, to listen to the chatter of sports and tabloid gossip.

― Atrona Grizel

The greatest conquest is invisible—the conquest of thought. To not submit to this mental colonization is to be unclassifiable, untranslatable, and unnamable by any kind of human-made tool.

― Atrona Grizel

Minds that lay eggs of thought in the shower possess this trait because outside the shower they rarely even approach true thinking. Such people are dependent on place, circumstance, and time. But for a mind that thinks independently of the body, where, in what situation, and at what time it thinks is not decisive—at most it is just background decoration.

― Atrona Grizel

One who hates themselves cannot be modest and humble, nor ethereal and cosmic.

― Atrona Grizel

There is a secret pleasure in being the only one who knows things that are unknown to all, yet still pretending to be just like everyone else—or at least concealing oneself so as not to be seen as unlike everyone else.

― Atrona Grizel

If people don’t understand, it’s because they cannot. One cannot explain to a baby who has not yet begun even to crawl what it is like to fly. Don’t waste the sacred.

― Atrona Grizel

Cioran says: “Beware of those who have turned their backs on ambition, on love, and on society: they will take revenge for having renounced them.” To be loved would shatter my entire ontological outlook and inner philosophy, causing my ghostly identity to slip from my grasp, for it demands a shared reality, which is disgusting to my compromise-allergic cognition. Perhaps people have loved me, but I have never felt loved, and I have never loved. As for society, it is not merely that I dislike or renounce it; for me, civilization does not even exist. What remains is ambition—but I doubt I am bound closely enough to humanity to carry an ambition for revenge. Even Cioran, when writing about mental exile, still used the word “we,” because he was speaking to humans. But such a “we” does not exist for me, nor does “I.” For I possess nothing outside myself—or even myself. His writing about those who renounce everything is aimed at people who still secretly crave the things they’ve rejected, who still live inside the coordinates of the human world despite alienation. His “revenge” is the backlash of a thwarted will. Yet my will is not one that turned sour, but a will that evaporated. There was no game to quit, because the board itself is a hallucination. To have rendered this planet and the universe utterly unreal or surreal, and thereby abolished the desire and need for vengeance—for one cannot fire at a dream: if that is to be counted as “revenge,” then I must be the most ferocious avenger.

― Atrona Grizel