Peter Greenaway Quotes

This is the writing of Nagiko Kiyohara no Motosuke Sei Shonagon, and I know you to have blackmailed, violated and humiliated my father. I suspect you also of ruining my husband. You have now committed the greatest crime -- you have desecrated the body of my lover. You and I now know that you have lived long enough.

The book to end all books. The final book. After this, there is no more writing, no more publishing.

Death is not necessarily an old and withered book with dry pages. It can be a thousand leaves of strong and shining text on a powerful body, held erect on the vertebrae of a strong spine. The heart hardly breathes because quietus has been reached, the torso is like a rock, the legs are rooted, the ink is dependable. If the words of death should be considered faded and sere -- where could be the dignity in dying?

Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.

Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.

Investigation is never complete.

Itch to read, scratch to understand.

A hand cannot write on itself.

Blind eyes cannot read.

Too late. Too late to retreat. Your heart is open. The book has got you. Your body is wide open. This rat of a book has invaded your privacy, worried its feeling into your entrails by every private passage.

If you were not to be its victim, this book and body would amuse you with its arrogance. It would make you laugh. Because you were not its victim, you could feel no pain of betrayal.

This book is past the first flush of youth. It is a book that is in puberty. It is hesitating, and from the vantage point of the mature reader, it is both a sad and amusing reminder of the part which is not always attractive enough to be revisited.

Where is a book before it is born? Does a book grow like a tree? Who are a book's parents? Does a book need two parents -- a mother and a father? Can a book be born inside another book? And where is the parent book of books?

If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.

The pages are so harmonious in their proportion / disharmony in the contents is impossible.