The thing about making [Dancer in the Dark] that upset me most — Björk

"Youll be given love Youll be taken care of Youll be given love You have to trust it"

"Its interesting for me to bring up a girl. You go to the toy store and the female characters there—Cinderella, the lady in Beauty and the Beast—their major task is to find Prince Charming. And Im like, wait a minute, its 2005! Weve fought so hard to have a say, and not just live through our partners, and yet youre still seeing two-year-old girls with this message pushed at them that the only important thing is to find this amazing dress so that the guy will want you. Its something my mum pointed out to me when I was little—so much [so] that I almost threw up; but, shes right."

"Emotional landscapes They puzzle me The riddle gets solved and you push me up to This state of emergency How beautiful to be State of emergency Is where I want to be"

"I … thought about all the artists that I really respected and liked. They were just them. … Theyre people who always stuck to who they were, and were true and honest about who they were. So, I think that kind of gave me … confidence to just stick at it. Just thinking about people like Björk. You know? [Like] Bob Dylan … artists that truly were strong in themselves."

"But, but, these are the people that made the Busby Berkeley movies, yeah? So theyre not exactly subtle."

"Oh thou that bowest Thy ecstatic face Thy perfect sorrows Are the worlds to keep Wherefore onto thy knees Come we With a prayer"

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"