Tenth Tuesday Quotables

Tagged as Quotes

Written on 2007-07-24 11:20:34

"I had always assumed that any attempt at my contact with God would be not only presumptuous, but actually contradictory: since, obviously, if I am his creation, then I experience God through the gift of life, and my obligation is to take care of the gift.The giver, presumably, delivered the gift, or sent the gift, or I inherited the gift from him. Present in the gift, the giver remains nevertheless outside of it, beyond my comprehension. To separate the giver from the gift is, perhaps, to diminish the gift. It is this miracle of life and the supreme mystery of being that unites me with my fellow beings; any speculation about the miracle and mystery of the Supreme Being tends to separate me from them. That is how I have looked at it as a boy, and, frankly, I still look at it that way." - Jerzy Kosinski

"My prayer is my exaltation in life's moment; it comes to me moment by moment, always concurrent with the act of life, and it's the sole way in which I acknowledge what's spiritual in my existence. I consciously narrow my life to the acts of my faith in it-acts which are spiritually significant-and I keep setting aside anything which is insignificant, which obstructs my awe of creation. This is my prayer; other prayers are creations of others and I look at them the way I look at religions, books, poems, works of art-they are all manifestations of spiritual life. In my life and for my life, I have chosen one particular form of spiritual worship, and I manifest it as I go along." - Jerzy Kosinski

"I am convinced, and I see it manifested in almost every phase of modern living, from the corporate to the Woodstock ends of the spectrum, from the hard-hat executive to the professional revolutionary, that we are a culture of the denial of the self." - Jerzy Kosinski

"The entrapments of collectivism are overwhelming: TV and radio, which permeate our privacy and destroy the aloneness out of which it becomes possible to learn to build a self; drugs, which smash the mirror of personal identity; the virtual disappearance of creative self-employment, and of professions and opportunities which ask for the use of the self; the terrifying featurelessness of the modern physical environment; the debilitation of the arts; the great gray educational machine; the devaluing and disparaging of the imagination: the "own" things of the eroded self." - Jerzy Kosinski

"He was one of those in our society I call 'Dead Souls'. At best, I find they share situations: they sit and watch films or television or listen to music in a group, thus isolated by a collective medium which permits each of them to escape direct contact with the others." - Jerzy Kosinski

"I think of such fears and wants as obstructions of life-of deprecating the worth of me as a man. To counteract them, I remain grateful for what I have-my life and my awareness of its spectacle-rather than fearful of what might happen, regretful of what I don't have or what pains me. Perception of pain has always contributed to my awareness of myself. Sin is allowing pain-any pain- to damage the sanctity of life, to regress the drama of my spiritual redemption." - Jerzy Kosinski

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