Mr. Harris: This drug had been advertised to us as something that can reveal something about the nature of human mind. And it was exactly what we experienced. For those who has taken MDMA, it won't be a surprise. There was no psychedelic component in it, no change in visual properties, or anything. What there was, was just a feeling of dropping away of self-concern. That was totally liberating. I'd never realised that I was carrying around this burden of self. To the degree that I was. When talking to somebody, the part of my attention was bound up in worrying about what they thought of me. I wasn't just seeing the other person, I was triangulating on myself, through their eyes. Modifying how I felt about myself.

And so I was sitting there with a very close friend at that time and I didn't even noticed that drop-away at that moment. I kind of retrospectively realised: Oh, My - this thing is gone! This monster of me, which has been behind my face, is gone! And I'm just free to realise that I love and wish nothing but happiness to the person, I'm sitting with. For that MDMA experience Love is the main epiphany. Love is a state of being, which entails just being deeply commited to the happiness of other beings. Whether you know them or not.

The epiphany that really anchored that to me and how I realised, that something unusual had happened to my mind, was that I was sitting, again, with my best friend at that time, and realising how much I love this guy. And we both were teenage, heterosexual men, who even hadn't thought in those terms - loving your male friends. I don't think I'd ever hugged a male friend before that point in my life. There was just this outpouring love to the friend of mine. And then I realised that if a stranger had walked into that room, I had loved that stranger, too.

Mr. Knausgård: "That's the only way to have a relationship, really. If you don't lie, it will collapse. "

Mr. Sullivan 

A pass by remark: "They are not your friends. They're just people you happen to know now."

Ms. Butler: "It happened last year, some time, I come to door, and there is this man and he says: "excuse me, Mister..., Madam..., Mister, Madam..." 

He couldn't get through it. 

I kinda leaned forward and asked "is it really important to determine my gender in order to check minibar?" 

Of course, I humiliated him and immediately felt really bad. And this was also a class moment, and I was not sensitive to that. He's a worker, he doesn't know, what to do with people like me. 

And then he said: "of  course, not, Mister..., Madam..., Mister..., Madam."

And then, the next day, I go to the pool. The same hotel. I then was in the ladies' locker room changing and a young woman comes in and says: "Oh, oh, do the ladies and the blokes change together?" 

"No, no, I don't think so. This IS for the ladies," I said. 

And she said: "Oh, sorry, sorry, I was so confused!"

Then I leaned forward, making up from my sin of the previous day and I said: "I am a lady."

Which is the first time in my life that I ever said it."

Just a random Sunday crush (the image that appeared for no longer than a second in documentary about Sibelius.)

Mr. Warhol: "Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you. Because someone has got to care of all your details. You've died and someone has got to take care of your body, make the funeral arrangements, pick out the casket and the service, and the cemetery, and the clothes for you to wear, and get someone to style you and do the make-up. You'd like to help them. And most of all you'd like to do the whole thing yourself. But your're dead, so you can't. Here you spend your whole life trying to make enough money to take care of yourself, so you won't bother anyone else with your problems. And then you wind up dumping the biggest problem ever in somebody else's lap. It's a shame. I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, and everything could just keep going as it was. Only you just won't be there."

Mr. Rorty: "I can still remember things, that I have done to other people 30 or 40 years ago. That emotions of shame and guilt are so intense, that I instantly try to distrack my attention. It isn't like I remember inflicting deliberate pain on anybody, it's just acts of omission: it would have been so easy to have done something for her or it would have been so easy to be kind, but I wasn't. Something like that."

Mr. Vidal: "we had the saying at MGM that the power man, the commander of movie, was the producer. The pretty man was the star, the creative man was the writer, and the director was a brother-in-law - usually of some high ranking official at the studio. [..] The writers were pretty cynical about the directors, and the writers outranked the directors until the 50's. They've got paid more, generally, "

Akkungs, cik viņa skaisti smejas, iemīlēties var.

Attēlam šajā izlasē gan ir viens būtisks trūkums, tā varonis ir dzīvs un netālu, tāpēc bīstams.

Mr. Isherwood: "So there you are. Probably you are amused, possibly you are irritated, you think I'm not serious. I hardly know what to add by way of expression. There are plenty of people, who would admire the noble ruins of Antiquity, the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. I, it seems, belong to a tiny, perverse minority, who prefer ignoble ruins of the day before yesterday."

Pre-Bauhaus, pre-WWI, pre-Alma Mahler