Andrei Tarkovsky

Science? Nonsense! In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally useless! I must tell you that we really have no desire to conquer any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth up to its borders. We don't know what to do with other worlds. We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle to make contact, but we'll never achieve it. We are in a ridiculous predicament of man pursuing a goal that he fears and that he really does not need. Man needs man!

When man is happy, the meaning of life and other eternal themes rarely interest him. These questions should be asked at the end of one's life.

Don't rush. The happiest people are those who are not interested in these cursed questions.

"They come at night. But one must sleep sometime." That's the problem. Mankind has lost the ability to sleep. You'd better read. I'm a little excited.

Don't turn a scientific problem into a common love story.

We don't want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly. We don't want other worlds; we want a mirror. We seek contact and will never achieve it. We are in the foolish position of a man striving for a goal he fears and doesn't want. Man needs man!

Sometimes you become a clown without wanting to.

In my opinion, we have lost our sense of the cosmic. The ancients understood it perfectly. They never would have asked why or what for. Remember the myth of Sisyphus?

Don't tell me you haven't tried a rope or a hammer. Did you happen to throw the inkwell like Luther? No?

Everything began after we started experimenting with radiation. Wehit the Ocean's surface with strong X-ray beams. But it - incidentally, consider yourself lucky. After all, she's part of your past. What if it had been something you had never seen before, but something you had thought or imagined?

Evidently the Ocean responded to our heavy radiation with something else. It probed our minds and extracted something like islands of memory.

What a ghastly sight. I can never get used to all these resurrections.