quoth the madman

"Being abstract is something profoundly different from being vague. … The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise."

~Edsger Dijkstra

quoth the madman

"After the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it’s burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being - and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth."

~Carl Sagan

literacki

"I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for."

~Lucy Grealy (Autobiography of a Face)

quoth the madman

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."

~Oscar Wilde

quoth the madman

 

"… I feel extremely little. And don’t want to rouse feeling. What I’m afraid of is the taunt charm and emptiness. That is my fear."

— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 20 May 1938

literacki

"And if you don’t come and lock me up with your voice
in the deep nocturnal house,
then I must pour myself out of my hands
into the gardens of
dark blue…"

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Bride” in The Book of Images

quoth the madman

"Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection."

~Arthur Schopenhauer

quoth the madman

"Apparently orgasm is the only point where your mind becomes completely empty—you think of nothing for that second. that’s why it’s so compelling—it’s a tiny taste of death. your mind is void—you have nothing in your head save white light."

~Jeff Buckley

dance off

prison guard

rubber fucker

quoth the madman

"We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them."

— Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam: A Book of Aphorisms

muscle duo

body

literacki

"Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth."

— Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes

literacki

 

"… the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears."— Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveller…

Wad

literacki

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

quoth the madman

I suppose I love this life, in spite of my clenched fist.

~Andrea Gibson

glass

 

quoth the madman

"Necessity dominates inclination, will, and right."

~Napoleon Bonaparte

no doubt

“Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (John 20:29)

quoth the madman

"In any moment,
you are either observing effortlessly
or you are believing your thoughts."

~Jac O’Keefe

literacki

"Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to ‘idealize’ a world which ought to be.

But no matter what political or religious direction such ‘idealists’ choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens, or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength."

~David James Duncan - The Brothers K

epic

quoth the madman

"Nor can we say Being was or will be,
Because Being is now, whole, one, continuous."

~Parmenides, fragment 8

position

let 'er rip

hands free

quoth the madman

"An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."
~  Ezra Pound, from “A Few Don’t by an Imagiste” in Poetry, March 1913

quoth the madman

"What is beautiful is easily lost."

~Charles Simic

country

quoth the madman

"No matter how many times I tell you this, you’re still thinking, thinking, judging, judging, coming to conclusions, trying to work out your life. You have to let go. Totally, absolutely, completely."

~Robert Adams

quoth the madman

"The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue."

~Confucius (551-479 BC)

quoth the madman

"Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty."

~Galileo Galilei

quoth the madman

"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life."

~Rachel Carson