A person who can be brainwashed has no brain.
A person who can be brainwashed has no brain.
― Atrona Grizel
If someone is trying to love something or someone, then they do not love.
― Atrona Grizel
For any work to leave a “trace” on a person is, in essence, a form of assimilation. The books one reads, the songs one listens to, or the films one watches derive their influence from the fact that they speak a common language; an alien, by contrast, would simply stare at them without meaning. And a common language necessarily implies belonging to a community, which in turn reveals a scarcity of individuality—that is, a scarcity of reality. The most real person is the one who is affected the least. Dead? No. They have merely ceased to live in the world inhabited by everyone else and have carried their life into another dimension.
― Atrona Grizel
I read the biographies of those nihilistic writers and philosophers who relentlessly curse society and civilization in their texts: professor at such-and-such institution… recipient of such-and-such award… slept with such-and-such women… In other words, even their pessimism appears to me as a kind of “style” or “pose.” When I compare their lives with their works, such a double-sided portrait emerges before me. Which face of this picture should one look at and believe?
― Atrona Grizel
In moments of boredom, I sometimes drift into the “world of adolescents” within the digital realm, because there are, in truth, interesting things there—even if many are superficial. I discover songs. Music. Pleasant melodies. These are usually elements of empty pop culture that have become widely heard through trends spreading across social media applications. Yet whatever the song or the music may be, at its core it remains a song or music, does it not? That is why I listen—banishing from my mind all the values attached to them, focusing only on the art itself. And I truly do enjoy listening. It is like listening to a gentle folk tune hummed from the enemy front line, accompanied by a harmonica.
― Atrona Grizel
If I were to produce works—let us say I wrote hundreds of books, composed thousands of pieces of music, and painted tens of thousands of paintings—and people’s interest, affection, and respect for me suddenly increased, that would merely show that they see me according to my function. They would be loving my objects—my works—not myself, because people most often assign value according to physical possessions. In truth, everyone is a kind of spiritual parasite: who loves the hen that lays no eggs, simply because it is a hen?
― Atrona Grizel
If there were no death, there would be no thought. Why would someone who lives forever spend their time within philosophical dilemmas and existential questions? Even if they did, imagine centuries later: their mind, by virtue of knowing everything, would gradually turn into a stagnant landfill through which nothing can pass.
― Atrona Grizel
Sometimes I want to be frozen—not killed, but simply “stopped”—and then, perhaps decades later, perhaps a century later, for the ice to thaw, and for me to open my eyes exactly as I am now into a technological world where radical scientific advances have been achieved, where disease, aging, and death have been eliminated, and thus to become immortal. In theory, it is appealing; in practice, impossible. Death, when viewed through the eyes of a scientist, appears almost like the misfortune of those born in the wrong, “previous” era, and I carry the constant awareness of having been born into one of them.
― Atrona Grizel
When I am extremely solitary, I sometimes remind myself of the fact that I have forgotten—since I have not interacted with them for a long time—how foolish people can be, and thus I once again realize that the masterpieces for which I sacrificed hundreds of pages, my nights and my days, are being read in the hands of creatures conditioned to scroll the screen, press the heart button, and rush to the next post, and so I immediately lower my expectations again.
― Atrona Grizel