TO LIVE IS TO LEARN

FEDERICO FELLINI  -  AMARCORD

 

“I have not much to say.

 I believe I have learned very little in all these years: I have learned that there are many reckless things you can do. And among those millions there is one that is more reckless still than the others. And usually you do that one.

I have learned that blue and black together are a punch in the eye.

I have learned that certain smells fix themselves in the memory, and when you smell them again it is as if all those years had never passed.

I have learned that Saturday is better than Sunday.

I have realised that everyone has something to tell, but I have also realised that hating certain people helps you live better.

I have learned that on certain mornings you would give away an arm just to sleep another five minutes.

I have found that some cities are capable of making you forget even your own name.

I have learned that there are people so aesthetically stunning that they actually give off a light of their own. They seem, I don't know... phosphorescent!

I have realised there is no need to worry if at forty you do not know what to do with your life, so long as you still have a great desire to play.               Perhaps you are the only one who has understood something.

I have learned that if you repeat a word many times over, all at once it loses its meaning.

I have learned that sometimes you want to make love with a particular person so badly that you would ask them on your knees.

I have learned that a cigarette, especially when you are down, can actually save your life.

I have discovered that there are people so tiresome that they amount to a genuine ornament on one's testicles.

I have learned that there is nothing more intoxicating than digging your heels in over your own choice. And then being wrong.

I have learned that the comfort of friends can sometimes be cruel.

I have learned that the voice of Frank Sinatra is one of the reasons for being in this world. And Heineken is the other.

I have learned that the salt goes in before the water starts to boil.

 

 

 

 

I have realised that certain rules are made to be broken. I have noticed that there is nothing more amusing than agreeing with an idiot.

And laughing inside.

I have discovered that over the years you learn to love your mistakes and your regrets like children.

I have learned that nostalgia has the same taste as boiling hot chocolate.

I have learned that Ingmar Bergman's films are not only masterpieces: they are lessons in life.

I have realised that nothing is finer than getting up at night while everyone else is asleep and wandering about alone like a dog among the rubbish, in search of any sensation at all that might satisfy.

I have learned that if they ask you to do five things and at the last moment add two more, you inevitably forget the first three.

I have learned that some people have a head only to keep their ears apart.

I have learned that your favourite shirt attracts tomato sauce with deadly accuracy.

I have learned that there is nothing finer than waking up one morning without knowing what time it is, without recognising the room and, above all, without remembering how you got there.

But above all I have learned that the truly important days in a person's life are five or six in all.

All the others just make up the volume.

So in sixty years' time you will not remember the day of your graduation, or the day you won an Oscar.

You will remember that evening when you and your friends, the real ones, smoked ten cigarettes each and, blind drunk, sang at the top of your voices in the street, soaked through with rain.

Those are the moments when life really beats harder.

Federico Fellini

P.S.: And yet, deep down, I did learn something

 

QUOTATIONS ON THE BLACKBOARD

 

“ The time to read, like the time to love, expands the time to live.”

Daniel Pennac  - Like a Novel

 

“ I grew up among books, making invisible friends among dusty pages whose smell I still carry on my hands. “

Carlos Ruiz Zafón – The Shadow of the Wind

 

“ Here is my secret. It is very simple: one sees only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – The Little Prince

 

“Where words fail, music speaks”

Hans Christian Andersen

 

“ Be what you would seem to be”

Or, to put it more simply: Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

“We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.

  • How do you know I'm mad? said Alice
  • You must be, said the Cat, or you wouldn't have come here.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)   - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

 

 “ Life is a path of Knowledge: to live is to learn “

Konrad Lorenz

 

palette knife oil on canvas
100x60
2020
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