Quotes & Sayings About Rorschach

For my own part, regret nothing. Have lived life, free from compromise ... and step into the shadow now without complaint.
-Rorschach — Alan Moore

I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that isn't the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. — Alan Moore

Without my face, nobody knows. Nobody knows who I am. — Alan Moore

For three decades, in describing people's relationships with computers, I have often used the metaphor of the Rorschach, the inkblot test that psychologists use as a screen onto which people can project their feelings and styles of thought. But as children interact with sociable robots like Furbies, they move beyond a psychology of projection to a new psychology of engagement. They try to deal with the robot as they would deal with a pet or a person. — Sherry Turkle

I am fond of reminding my yoga students of the saying "It takes one to know one" when they become lost I condemnation and judgment of others. The world that we perceive is a reflection of our own states of mind and reveals our own level of consciousness. The world is little more than a Rorschach blot in which we see our own desire systems projected. We see what we want to see. (116) — Prem Prakash

At the very beginning, I said my life and Playboy are a Rorschach test. It's a culmination of the dreams and fantasies and prejudices you bring to the table — Christie Hefner

I heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Life seems harsh, and cruel. Says he feels all alone in threatening world. Doctor says: "Treatment is simple. The great clown - Pagliacci - is in town. Go see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. "But doctor ... " he says "I am Pagliacci." Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains. — Alan Moore

The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered. Reality is the original Rorschach. Verily! So much for all that. — Malaclypse The Younger

Will there be no more irises
in your garden tomorrow morning,
or perhaps any rainbows that covet
your roof will melt into Rorschach pastels
in your gutters and birdsongs in your windows
turn into shrill shriekings as you recall
how, for one moment, you were as brave
and equal to beauty as that which you feel?
Can't a world end gloriously? — B.J. Ward

I'm no superhero. If anything I'm Rorschach from Watchmen. I'm Grendel. I'm the survivor in Silent Hill. — Kendare Blake

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know. — Alan W. Watts

Rorschach did not seek death; he didn't commit suicide by Manhattan. But he understood what the others did not. "It is better to sacrifice life than to forfeit morality. It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary that, so long as we live, we do so honourably."18 — William Irwin

What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself — Lewis Mumford

No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you? — Ken Kesey

A book collection is a cross between a Rorschach test and This Is Y our Life. It marks your life clearly like rings on a tree. — Margo Kaufman

... After all, each story is a Rorschach Test, isn't it? And if people find beasties and bedbugs in my ink-splotches, I cannot prevent it, can I? They will insist on seeing them, anyway, and that is their privilege. Still, I wish people, quasi-intellectuals, did not try so hard to find the man under the old maid's bed. More often than not, as we know, he simply isn't there. — Ray Bradbury

Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality. — John Battelle

I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives - into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophiticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her. — Chandler Burr

as she slept, her period came because bodies know nothing about timing, bodies, awful bodies. They put a Rorschach between your thighs and stain your sheets to remind you that all you're doing is bleeding and dying if you're not making more life. That — Catherine Lacey

You see, Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew ... God doesn't make the world this way. We do. — Alan Moore

Dan: We're looking at World War Three within the WEEK! I mean, what do we DO? The stakes are so high and humanity is so close to the edge ...
Rorschach: Some of us have always lived on edge, Daniel. It is possible to survive there if you observe rules: Just hang on by fingernails ... and never look down. — Alan Moore

Weddings are giant Rorschach tests onto which everyone around you projects their fears, fantasies, and expectations
many of which they've been cultivating since the day you were born. — Susan Jane Gilman

Honor Is Like the Hawk . . . For my own part, regret nothing. Have lived life, free from compromise . . . and step into the shadow now without complaint. - Rorschach's journal, — William Irwin

And yet there are other days, when I'm downtrodden or morose, when I find myself at my desk late at night, unable to sleep, flipping through (of all things) Oscar's dog-eared copy of Watchmen. One of the few things that he took with him on the Final Voyage that we recovered. The original trade. I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: "A Stronger Loving World." To the only panel he's circled. Oscar - who never defaced a book in his life - circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt's plan has succeded in "saving the world." Veidt says: "I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end." And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: "In — Junot Diaz

Where do nations begin? In airport lounges, of course. You see them arriving, soul by soul, in pre-activation mode. They step into no man's land, with only their passports to hold onto, and follow the signs to the departure gate. There, among the impersonal plastic chairs and despite themselves, they coalesce into the murky Rorschach stain of nationhood. — Kapka Kassabova

Reality is the original Rorschach. — Malaclypse The Younger

This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you! — Richard Feynman

[L]et them be their own Rorschach tests[.] — Evan Dara

It's funny, I've decided 'Hallelujah' is a kind of Rorschach test for people, because everyone has a different reaction to it and to what I'm doing. I just sang it, and whatever came out was just natural and spontaneous and maybe that's the best thing, because there's a kind of enigma, both in the meaning of the words and the way Leonard Cohen said them, that catches people's attention. — Renee Fleming

I live my life free of compromise, and step into the shadows without complaint or regret. — Alan Moore

It was Kovacs who said "Mother" then, muffled under latex. It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again. — Alan Moore

Walt Disney was a master of the human psychology. His sense of timing, sense of speed. In a sense, those cartoons are like Rorschach tests. — Twyla Tharp

My left hand is a Rorschach blotch all its own, a six-fingered, skin-blood-and-bone ink splatter. People see it and fly their worst fears and secret fetishes at full mast when they think they're being discreet. They see it as strange, fascinating, ugly, beautiful, disgusting or erotic depending on what's behind their eyes. — Craig Clevenger

His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his heels gathering small windrows of trash. A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. He lay with his head on the moldy upholstery of an old car seat among packingcrates and broken shoes and suncrazed rubber toys in the dark. Something warm was running on his chest. He put up a hand. I am bleeding. Unto my death. — Cormac McCarthy

'Twin Peaks' is one of those Rorschach ink blot things, where everybody finds their own favorite thing. — Michael J. Anderson

Dr. Malcolm Long: Walter, is what happened to Kitty Genovese really proof that the whole of mankind is rotten? I think you've been conditioned with a negative worldview. There are good people, too, like...

Rorschach: Like you?

Dr. Malcolm Long: Me? Oh, well, I wouldn't say that. I...

Rorschach: No. You just think it. Think you're 'good people'. Why are you spending so much time with me, Doctor?

Dr. Malcolm Long: Uh...well, because I care about you, and because I want to make you well...

Rorschach: Other people, down in cells. Behavior more extreme than mine. You don't spend any time with them...but then, they're not famous. Won't get your name in the journals. You don't want to make me well. Just want to know what makes me sick. You'll find out. Have patience, Doctor. You'll find out. — Alan Moore

Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us.
-Rorschach. — Alan Moore

Rorschach: Used to come here often, back when we were partners.
Dreiberg: Oh. Uh, yeah ... yeah, those were great times, Rorschach. Great times. Whatever happened to them?
Rorschach: [exiting] You quit. — Alan Moore

Comics are like a Rorschach test; everyone has a different opinion on what they are and can be. — Michael Sacal

History is a Rorschach test, people. What you see when you look at it tells you as much about yourself as it does about the past. — Jennifer Donnelly

Nite-Owl: Look, I just meant we took enough unnecessary risks retrieving your outfit this morning ...
Rorschach: Unnecessary? Cowering down here in sludge and pollution, conjuring names on screens, learning nothing: that is unnecessary. Give me smallest finger on man's hand. I'll produce information. Computer unnecessary. This face, all that's necessary ... all I need. — Alan Moore

Can you design a Rorschach test that's going to make everyone feel something every time - and that looks like a Rorschach test? It's easy to show a picture of a kitten or a car accident. The question is, how abstract can you get and still get the audience to feel something when they don't know what's happening to them? — Jason Reitman

From Binet, the idea of measuring imagination with inkblots spread to a string of American intelligence-testing pioneers and educators - Dearborn, Sharp, Whipple, Kirkpatrick. It reached Russia as well, where a psychology professor named Fyodor Rybakov, unaware of the Americans' work, included a series of eight blots in his Atlas of the Experimental-Psychology Study of Personality (1910). It was an American, Guy Montrose Whipple, who called his version an "ink-blot test" in his Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (also 1910) - this is why the Rorschach cards would come to be called "inkblots" when American psychologists took them — Damion Searls