quoth the madman

"Seek nothing. Forget."

— Henri-Georges Clouzot, L’Enfer

ars poetica

"Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island.
I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind."

— Margaret Atwood, from “Circe/Mud Poems” in Selected Poems I

literacki

"We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it."

— Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

literacki

"The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories. The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely, imagining. He would not integrate, as I do. He would not have this devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out grate. Some blind flaps in my eyes. Everything becomes impervious. I cease to invent."

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

literacki

"I escape into sleep. Sleep is what I’ll miss most when I die."

~ Anna Kamienska, from “A Nest of Quiet,”

literacki

"A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one
Of sprites and goblins."

— Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

literacki

"Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries."

— Maxine Kumin, from “After Love”

literacki

"Life should be more
Than the body’s weight working itself from room to room."

— Mark Strand, from “The Next Time”

literacki

"… beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments."

— Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose

quoth the madman

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.

~Albert Einstein

literacki

"What if I made you
Hear this with your hands?"
— Ben Lerner, from "Mean Free Path"

literacki

"If I now dream about your hands, your hair,
It is the vividness of that dead end
I miss. Like chess. Mind against mind."

— Louise Glück, from “Dead End”

ars poetica

"I am all that I am not, and I am not
what I shall become—who knows?"

— Joyce Sutphen, from “Key of Dust”

quoth the madman

People will kill you over time, and how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like “be realistic.

Dylan Moran

literacki

"A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.
Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs."

— Jane Hirshfield, from “A Hand”

literacki

"Your angels were faithless, lines of light dividing
air and dust. Transparent—you, the future,
most of all, your disappointment.
Before you ask what I mean by disappointment
understand, those were butter days,
of heat and sweet corn,
nights of loose horses running through us,
the shine of their silken knees."

~Susan Elbe, from Once Not, Now Broken

quoth the madman

"It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple."

Rabindranath Tagore

literacki

"Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again."
~Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

quoth the madman

“This is to be mortal, And seek the things beyond mortality.”
― George Gordon Byron

wrestlehard

prime beef

tim and johnny gunn

muscle colt

literacki

"We see ourselves from the outside, and all the contingency and specificity of our aims and pursuits become clear. Yet when we take this view and recognize what we do as arbitrary, it does not disengage us from life, and there lies our absurdity."

Thomas Nagel, The Absurd

literacki

"It was so gorgeous it almost felt like sadness."

Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake

literacki

"Humans have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves, and the lives to which they are committed, with that detached amazement which comes from watching an ant struggle up a heap of sand. Without developing the illusion that they are able to escape from their highly specific and idiosyncratic position, they can view it sub specie aeternitatis—and the view is at once sobering and comical."

Thomas Nagel, The Absurd

literacki

What is it? Where am I? And why, after all, does one do it?

~Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Scored

Daddy Fucker

Steve 1

Steve 2

quoth the madman

"Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence."
~Erma Bombeck

drinking cum

butt munch

fucking the straight dude

quoth the madman

"To the bad habit of talking about oneself and one’s faults must be added the related habit of criticizing the same faults in others. This is only a hidden manner of talking about oneself which combines the pleasure of absolution with that of confession."

— Marcel Proust

quoth the madman

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

~Roald Dahl

quoth the madman

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.”
-Frank Lloyd Wright

quoth the madman

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me.
I cannot even explain it to myself.

Franz Kafka

literacki

The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.

Lemony Snicket, The End

quoth the madman

I take much pleasure in being alone, but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone.

Charles Bukowski

gentle giant

gentle giant

literacki

When a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master,
but lies at the mercy of fortune.

Spinoza, Ethics

literacki

When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out.
We want to believe it was all like that.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

rim and precum

literacki

"May my silences become more accurate."

— Theodore Roethke, from “Words for Young Writers” in On Poetry and Craft

literacki

"I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts."

— Carl Sandburg, from “Autumn Movement”

literacki

"I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can."

— Jack Gilbert, from “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”

quoth the madman

Open still remains the earth for great souls. There are still many empty seats for the lonesome and the twosome, fanned by the fragrance of silent seas.

~Friedrich Nietzsche | Thus Spoke Zarathustra

literacki

But I know I live half alive in the world, half my life belongs to the wild darkness.

~Galway Kinnell, Middle of the Way

spunky

literacki

I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with. I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer. I didn’t easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music.
~Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

ars poetica

I though that Storm—was brief—
The Maddest—quickest by—
But Nature lost the Date of This—
And left it in the Sky—

Emily Dickinson, from “[362]”

quoth the madman

I have learned and unlearned how to live hundreds of times.

Paulo Coelho

quoth the madman

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Albert Einstein

quoth the madman

I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.

Ferdinand von Schrubentaufft

quoth the madman

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

~Nietzsche

literacki

"…because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy."

~Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

quoth the madman

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
~Jean-Paul Sartre

quoth the madman

"A Great Silence overcomes me, and I wonder why I ever thought to use language."

~Rumi

quoth the madman

"But if you do not find an intelligent companion, a wise and well-behaved person going the same way as yourself, then go on your way alone, like a king abandoning a conquered kingdom, or like a great elephant in the deep forest."

~Buddha