Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes

Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign.

Don’t you see? You and he might never cross paths again. Of course, a chance meeting could occur, and I hope it happens. I really do, for your sake. But realistically speaking, you have to see there’s a huge possibility you’ll never be able to meet him again. And even if you do meet, he might already be married to somebody else. He might have two kids. Isn’t that so? And in that case, you may have to live the rest of your life alone, never being joined with the one person you love in all the world. Don’t you find that scary?

Living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world. What I find appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. There would be a goal involved, and I like having goals.

When you’re focused outside and believe that your problem is caused by someone else, rather than by your attachment to the story you’re believing in the moment, then you are your own victim, and the situation appears to be hopeless.

I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.

He is the straight to video sequel to your summer hit movie. He is the verse to that song on the radio you have to hum cause you can’t remember the words. You couldn’t break this kid’s heart, he is so far beyond that. This is the kind of kid who blew out the candles on hope all alone for too many birthdays to remember. And no one has ever fallen in love with anyone with a smile that’s dripping with “please die”.

I still didn't look at him. I was afraid if I did that, I would turn around, run back to him, and hurl myself into his arms.

The best reason for exposing oneself to foreign ways is to generate a sense of vitality and awareness - an interest in life which can come only when one lives through the shock of contrast and difference.

The people who have adored me-- there have not been very many, but there have been some-- have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.

Never love for me, only obsession.

I cared about us. But the cold hard truth was, nothing I said or did could realign the stars.

For me, the experience of being in other culture really set up a longing. When I'm traveling, things seem really sharp. You learn things ten times faster.

He almost said to himself that he did not like her, before their conversation ended; he tried so hard to compensate himself for the mortified feeling, that while he looked upon her with an admiration he could not repress, she looked at him with proud indifference, taking him, he thought, for what, in his irritation, he told himself - was a great fellow, with not a grace or a refinement about him.

She had borne so long the cruelty of belonging to him and not being claimed by him.

All this hoping for nothing-or someone-that's maybe hopeless

I thought I was getting better at this. I thought I was starting to make peace with being in love with a girl who despises me, but I don't think I'm so okay with it after all. Somewhere along the line I made a dark bargain with the universe without ever really being aware of it--a bargain that if I was allowed to see her, even if we never spoke, then I could live with that. And now a week without her has swallowed up all of my rational thinking. I feel like a junkie, sick for my next fix and not sure when it will come.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

Those [American Jews] who favor the [Israeli] attack on Gaza are certainly guilty of such overwhelming emotional and cultural attachment to Israel and Israelis, that they long ago ceased viewing this conflict with any remnant of objectivity.

And I'm stuck in it with no way out. I love you, and I can't stop, and you don't even care!

I guess one of the things that is an advantage of the world in which we live is that I can at least I can have multiple homes. I can have that attachment to Montana and to Cambridge and to India.

Its a fine line between love and stalking.

You can want and want and want, but if he doesn't want you back ... you might as well wish the sky were red.

There's something I have about being Canadian - there's a distance it gives you when you live in the States and operate in American culture. You approach familiar things a different way; you come at it from a different angle. It's a trait that runs through a lot Canadian artists' work and actors' work and musicians' - that kind of special remove.

The beauty of being foreign is that it snaps you awake.

Everything has to do with loving and not loving.