Giorgio de Chirico Quotes

I want to appear ordinary, but I have it understood that I am not.

The memory is like orbiting twin stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.

Dark Error's other hidden side is truth.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase.

Things are not what they appear to be: nor are they otherwise.

To consider oneself different from ordinary men is wrong, but it is right to hope that one will not remain like ordinary men.

In the essence of truth lies deceit.

I'm obsessed with clowns and what they represent and the idea that clowns are supposed to make you laugh, but inevitably they're hiding something. That's how I look at my life.

There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.

Gay people, certainly gay people of my generation, at least of a certain echelon - middle-class Americans - have binocular vision. We all are raised by straight people and grow up with straight people and in straight families, but we all have this totally other way of looking at things. Increasingly as I get deeper into middle age, that is why I resist plunking for any one camp. Because I have this delicious sort of experience of being able to see things in two ways.

Every evil is some good spelt backwards, and in it the wise know how to read Wisdom.

God hides the fires of hell within paradise.

Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.

I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center.

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.

Because you showed one face to all the rest of the world, and another to me.

It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leporous.

What's interesting about the movie and characters is that they're one thing to the world and another thing in their heads.

She disapproved, but part of her seemed secretly to sympathize with the sickness. It was like she thought everybody had it, and the best you could do was to cover it up, and sometimes it would just come boiling out anyway. Then you had to point at it and condemn it, even though you knew you had it too.

Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?

A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes.

It is Spiritually impossible to hide and see at the same time.