{"quotes":[{"text":"People keep asking what I do for a living and I keep saying that I don’t believe in making a living. That it’s a concept that has been twisted. I tell them I believe in making a life and money is a distracting object if there’s anything left at the end of the day and I just want to go on well. Make it through the day. So I smile and raise my glass and they laugh and take my hand, saying ”here’s to the youth”, pointing at me. And I might just be youngand naivefor I still believe in the freedom of choiceof how to spend your life.So they toast to the youth, who still think she’s free, and that’s all fine by me.","author":"Charlotte Eriksson","tags":["berlin","drinks","drunk","free","freedom","growing-up","life","location-independent","making-a-living","money","nomadic","self-reliance","songwriter","unemployment","vagabond","wanderer","youth"],"id":27422,"author_id":"Charlotte+Eriksson"},{"text":"Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. ","author":"Janet Fitch","tags":["america","berlin","canvas","clean","empty","forgotten","learn","past","remembering","ruins"],"id":64870,"author_id":"Janet+Fitch"},{"text":"It’s the beating of my heart.  The way I lie awake, playing with shadows slowly climbing up my wall. The gentle moonlight slipping through my window and the sound of a lonely car somewhere far away, where I long to be too, I think. It’s the way I thought my restless wandering was over, that I’d found whatever I thought I had found, or wanted, or needed, and I started to collect my belongings. Build a home. Safe behind the comfort of these four walls and a closed door. Because as much as I tried or pretended or imagined myself as a part of all the people out there,I was still the one locking the door every night.Turning off the phone and blowing out the candles so no one knew I was home. ’cause I was never really well around the expectations of my personalityand I wanted to keep to myself. And because I haven’t been very impressed lately. By people, or places.Or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind.","author":"Charlotte Eriksson","tags":["alone","awake","berlin","candles","doors","expectations","found","home","impressed","lonely","lost","lost-love","love","moon","moonlight","night","people","personality","places","shadows","solitude","thoughts","travel","wall","wander","wandering","window"],"id":115121,"author_id":"Charlotte+Eriksson"},{"text":"Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committ.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["apartheid","apoliticism","argument","atheism","berlin","bought-priesthood","cape-coloureds","cold-war","communism","conviction","critical-thinking","enlightenment","euphemism","eurocentricism","faith","film","george-hw-bush","george-orwell","german-people","germany","groupthink","hedonism","humanism","individualism","irony","journalism","left-wing-politics","lies","literary-criticism","literature","los-angeles","margaret-thatcher","monotheism","munich","orthodoxy","personality-politics","politics","polytheism","populism","postmodernism","potus","progress","radical-politics","religion","right-wing-politics","ronald-reagan","russia","science","sectarianism","self-love","self-pity","socialism","solipsism","south-africa","soviet-union","thomas-mann","totalitarianism","tribalism","truth","united-states","xhosa-people","zulu-people"],"id":151951,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now.Blurred out linesfrom hangovers to coffeeAnother vagabond lost to love.4am alone and on my way.These are my finest moments.I scrub my skinto rid me from youand I still don’t know why I cried.It was just something in the way you took my heart and rearranged my insides and I couldn’t recognise the emptiness you left me with when you were done. Maybe you thought my insides would fit better this way, look better this way, to you and us and all the rest.But then you must have changed your mindor made a wrongbecause why did youleave?6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now.I replace cafés with crowded bars and empty roads with broken bottlesand this town is healing me slowly but still not slow or fast enough because there’s no right way to do this.There is no right way to do this.There is no right way to do this.","author":"Charlotte Eriksson","tags":["alone","berlin","break-up","breakup","broken-hearted","city","coffee","growing-up","hang-over","leaving","left","london","love","moving","moving-on","night","poetry","prose","sad","the-glass-child","walking","wandering"],"id":225492,"author_id":"Charlotte+Eriksson"},{"text":"The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the shipyards.","author":"Lech Walesa","tags":["fall","nice","berlin "],"id":230397,"author_id":"Lech+Walesa"},{"text":"My home will never be a place, but a state of mind, which I find through my music.","author":"Charlotte Eriksson","tags":["berlin","charlotte-eriksson","cities","finding-home","going-home","happiness","home","london","lost","music","place","the-glass-child"],"id":240266,"author_id":"Charlotte+Eriksson"},{"text":"Berlinerinnen also continue to reinvent Berlin fashion. Women like Claudia Skoda, c.Neeon (Clara Kraetsch and Doreen Schultz), Stadtkluft (Claudine Brignot of urbanspeed and Sandra Siewert of s.Wert) and Natascha Loch carry on the tradition of Berliner Chic and carry its meanings into today's fashion. Berlinerinnen will always be ready to wear: the women who live in the city, are photographed in its streets, wear local brands and give Berlin fashion its reputation as exigeant and schraeg. Without all of these women, there would be no Berliner Chic, and so it is to them that this project is dedicated.","author":"Katrina Sark","tags":["berlin","chic","fashion","ready-to-wear","women"],"id":240439,"author_id":"Katrina+Sark"},{"text":"Nothing much bothered you for a while and you kept walking like a silhouette through this town, saying hi’s and goodbyes, acting polite at all times. But there is no fire in your heart; you are not very concerned.","author":"Charlotte Eriksson","tags":["alone","berlin","break-up","concerned","fire","goodbye","heart","heartache","hi","lost","numb","poetry","polite","sad","saying","silhouette","town","walking"],"id":270243,"author_id":"Charlotte+Eriksson"},{"text":"Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change.","author":"Rory MacLean","tags":["identity","stability","berlin "],"id":285509,"author_id":"Rory+MacLean"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":21,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}