There are two screens that make the outside world unreal: one is made of glass, and one is made of pixels.
There are two screens that make the outside world unreal: one is made of glass, and one is made of pixels.
―
Atrona Grizel
I am the
staunchest supporter of the USSR: neither a communist nor a Bolshevik—just
someone genuine who carries a heart beating fiercely for the motherland. On
this matter, I believe I am not alone. Many people can, and do, share this
feeling. There is also a culture that has formed around this feeling, and I am
always aware of it; I prevent it from entering my mind in order to stay outside
of it. Because none of those people ever share the feeling that I feel. For
mine is a very particular bond—pure and sincere, cleansed of all culture and
influence. People learn about states from the outside, while I rewrite them
from within, without corrupting their roots, and thus they cease to be themselves
and become an archetype in my inner world. I believe that the USSR—even though
I have never been there—is something that only I truly know. I feel as though
there is a dark, empty room, and in it, I’m alone with the Soviets. In that
room, I see the soft, fearful, and innocent face it shows to no one else.
―
Atrona Grizel
They present love
as snapping a flower from its branch, fully aware that it will wither in a day
or two, and placing it in someone else’s hand merely to stage a “display of
affection.” I, on the other hand, see nothing but waste, and it hurts me. They
could send me bouquets upon bouquets of flowers, and all I would see scattered
around are flowers torn from their branches. The way natural beauty is sullied
in human hands, and the human mentality that sells this defilement as beauty,
turns my stomach. Love cannot be acquired through gifts, at least not through
physical ones. If someone tried to give me a ring, I would see only that
materialism has even seized romantic relationships, just as it had been for the
entire human history. Thus, I would throw it out the window instantly, perhaps
saying this instead: “Give me the real ring.” That is to say, the only true
gift is the meeting of inner worlds.
―
Atrona Grizel
Society is so
hostile to thought that it tries to confine it to certain designated areas and
keep it from contaminating life itself. Thought is not welcomed into daily
life; it is quarantined, into academies, for instance. And once you step
outside those buildings, you are returned to vulgarity. Public life defaults to
shallowness. Yet in reality, things are not much different even inside, because
institutions like these function less as engines of inquiry and more as
containment units. And if a person expresses deep thoughts outside the
boundaries of those so-called “nests of knowledge,” society already has a word
prepared to label them, turning depth into annoyance: “yapper.”
―
Atrona Grizel
Sometimes the
Moon feels to me like the world’s voyeur, because it constantly rotates around its
own axis, yet always in such a way that its face remains turned toward Earth.
As if it has wrapped itself around the world and is watching it endlessly,
never allowing it to escape. Every night it shows the same face to the world,
because it is spying on it. Luna is Gaia’s pervert.
―
Atrona Grizel
When my writings
reach people’s hands, they will treat them like bewildered monkeys who’ve just
discovered a new kind of tool or object, not knowing how to use it or what it’s
for. The reaction will not be comprehension but confusion. They’ll throw them
away, then pick them up again. They’ll tear them apart, then try to put them
back together. They will jump on them, and then try to eat them. Those
chimpanzees will dismiss my ideas, then return out simply of “curiosity”;
they’ll misinterpret or distort my meaning, then attempt to “reconstruct” it.
They don’t know how to read paradise.
―
Atrona Grizel
No institution
speaks badly of itself. That is proof that they are indeed so.
―
Atrona Grizel
Pride and
arrogance are always better than shyness and self-hate.
―
Atrona Grizel
Here, take my
heart.
It’s right before
you.
Its taste is
irresistible.
Take it away now.
Wrap it in your
beauty.
But don’t startle
it—never do that.
It’s fragile; you
might lose it.
Carry it
carefully wherever you go.
You’ll need it in
every realm you enter.
―
Atrona Grizel
Most are blind to
those rare, free spirits who carefully smooth every mark they make, erase every
footprint as they walk through places no one else visits. They make every
effort to avoid discovery, to remain unrevealed—as if they are carrying,
containing something immensely valuable, something they do not wish to be known
or stolen.
―
Atrona Grizel
Living on the
street would be physically more demanding but mentally easier for me.
―
Atrona Grizel
To survive, I
stripped people of their humanity in my mind, and naturally I feel no empathy
for them, because I think “a fly cannot suffer.” I buried my empathy in the
depths of my heart because I did not want it to become, again and again, a toy
wasted in the hands of the unnecessary. But I cannot believe that anyone who
could reach that depth actually exists; even if such a person might be exactly
what I’m looking for, I will not let them into me because I have torn out all
faith in their existence.
―
Atrona Grizel
To drive a
teenager raised in Western culture insane, it is enough to strip them of their
pleasure—whether it is entertainment, sexuality, sociality, comfort, wealth,
status, or appearance.
―
Atrona Grizel
Pride kills
communication, and the internalization of this pride by making it into a
principle, kills speaking as a whole. With a person who prefers death over
giving up their belief, what can be shared or what can be spoken about? Free
radicals who are fanatics of themselves are martyr-knights clad in impenetrable
armors. Yet they are happy in this noble loneliness they have gained by
suffering for it, for their solitude is not the lack of some wretched,
happenstance social life one might stumble into; it is a treasure earned
through effort.
―
Atrona Grizel
People are so
small to think that I am small.
―
Atrona Grizel
People’s comments
resemble a trash bin overflowing. I feel like emptying it.
―
Atrona Grizel
The greatest
torment? Having to witness myself being “interpreted” by others.
―
Atrona Grizel
“This makes me
question myself”: this expression should be regarded carefully, for it rarely
carries a positive meaning. It is almost synonymous with saying, “This insults
me.” People’s identities have, for the most part, developed in ways that
exclude self-questioning. One finds oneself facing a humanity that endlessly
throws around mottos like “reason” and “thought,” yet exhibits not the
slightest trace of either. To question would shatter their sense of self, for their
selves are superficial. As they descend deeper, they sense themselves—the
surface, that is—breaking apart, and therefore they never dare to try. Since
there is no real quality on the surface, there is an excess of spectacle and
noise; and this abundance turns self-affirming falseness into a kind of
culture, thereby trapping the unreflective person even more tightly within that
echo-chamber cycle.
―
Atrona Grizel
Democracy
proclaims, almost defiantly, that the sheer weight of numbers confers
legitimacy and correctness, that the collective voice of the herd outweighs the
discerning insights of the lucid few.
―
Atrona Grizel
There are two
kinds of artistic activity: the intuitive, which writes poems, paints pictures,
and composes music, and the conceptual, which generates ideas, dismantles
ideologies, and constructs cosmologies. While the first humbly draws stars on a
canvas, the second finds such existence small or inadequate and therefore asks:
“What is a star? What is the function of space? And why should I imagine the
cosmos in this way at all?”
― Atrona Grizel