"Penso que as ideias são muito contagiosas e por isso é muito difícil libertarmo-nos de certas convenções, certas maneiras de pensar. Mas julgo que o caminho para aquilo que considero a liberdade de pensamento, tem a ver com perspectivas múltiplas, não estar presa apenas ao meu lugar na cultura, qualquer que ele seja. Mas deslocar-me da minha posição para outros lugares e imaginar o que seria ser outra pessoa. E isso cria um extraordinário sentimento de liberdade, porque não ficamos presos ao nosso lugar no mundo."

Siri Hustvedt, in O Valor da Liberdade - Diálogos Sobre as Possibilidades do Humano

© Marion Ettlinger | Siri Hustvedt

After reading the essays collected in this book, I understood that although they take on a number of subjects, they are linked by an abiding curiosity about what it means to be human. How do you see, remember, feel, and interact with other people? What does it mean to sleep, to dream, and to speak? When we use the word self, what are we talking about?
(...)

It is importante to remember that despite the plethora of solutions, who we are and how we got that way remain open queries, not only in the humanities but in the sciences as well.

Siri Hustvedt, in Living,Thinking, Looking - essays

"O Valor da Liberdade - diálogos sobre as possibilidades do humano" com Siri Hustvedt, sábado 28, na SIC Notícias, às 20h. Repete domingo, às 14h30 e 01h30.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds | Murder Ballads, 1996

The writer who refuses to explore the darker reaches of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, magic and joy of love, for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil, so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.

Nick Cave, in The secret life of the love song - The complet lyrics 1978 - 2013

© Michael Kenna

Dreams use the language and imagery of making life, but their meanings are personal. Like most contemporany psychoanalysts, I do not believe in universal dream symbols, that stairs signify one thing and trees or kites another. Dreams are stories made by and for he dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Siri Hustvedt, in The Shaking Woman or A History Of My Nerves

Sofia Coppola | Lost in Translation, 2003

Poderá, assim, a pele ir imitando o céu na medida da sua humana (im)perfeição.

Rosa Alice Branco

© Thomas Wågström | Neckar (Necks)

The Other Side of the Face

Karl Ove Knausgård 

(aqui)

the secret life of...

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds | The Boatman's Call, 1997

"Love songs that attach themselves to actual experience, that are a poeticising of real events, have a beauty unto themselves. They stay alive in the same way memories do and, being alive, they grow up and undergo changes and develop. If a song is too weak to do that, if it is lacking in sufficient stamina and the will to endure, sadly, it will not survive. You'll come home one day and find it dead in the bottom of its cage. Its soul will have been reclaimed and all that will remain is a pile of useless words."

Nick Cave, in The secret life of the love song - The complet lyrics 1978 - 2013

Love is the drug

© The Guardian | Nick Cave

"Like most of us, Nick Cave has fallen in love a fair few times. Unlike most, he writes songs about it: sad, angry, violent songs. For the song to be true, he says, it has to recognise the potential for pain behind every love." 

in The Guardian | The secret life of the love song - The complet lyrics

Love is the drug

© Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds | Love Letter - No More Shall We Part, 2001

"We all experience within us what the Portuguese call "saudade", an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul, and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration, and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the love song. Saudade is the desire to be transported from darkness into light, to be touched by the hand of that which is not of this world. The love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting up though our wounds.

(...)

The love song must be borne into the realm of the irrational, the absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive and the insane, for it is the clamour of love itself, and love is, of course, a form of madness."

Nick Cave, in The secret life of love song - The complet lyrics 1978 - 2013

the secret life of...

"Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. My name is Nick Cave, and I've got a few things to tell you." 

in The secret life of the love song - The complet lyrics 1978 - 2013