ponderous

"All my life I’ve been waiting to be in this hell here with you." - Alice Notley, from All I Ever Wanted

ars poetica

All right, let’s say you could take a skull and break it
The way you’d crack a clock; you’d crush the bone
Between steel palms of inclination, take it,
Observing the wreck of metal and rare stone.
This was a woman: her loves and stratagems
Betrayed in mute geometry of broken
Cogs and disks, inane mechanic whims,
And idle coils of jargon yet unspoken.
Not man nor demigod could put together
The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels
Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,
Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.
The idiot bird leaps up and drunken leans
To chirp the hour in lunatic thirteens.
" - Sylvia Plath, from Sonnet: To Eva

ponder

He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.

~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

you may quote me

Just because I am not an open book,
doesn’t mean you gotta rip off my pages
or steal my chapters.
I am for one thing, one & only thing;
me, myself and nobody else.
I may be of little substance sometimes,
poorly expressed and vaguely uttered
but my feet knows where to
walk my own story.
Don’t confuse me with my ink,
or these ragged conversations,
or the number of years, months
weeks or days you’ve come to know me
because like numbers all these lose
their value once counted.
Don’t tell me what or who I am because
long before you, I’ve already been told
by myself.

quoth the madman

"What is life? - A novel. Who is the author? - Anonymous. We read haltingly, laugh, weep… and sleep."

— Nikolai Karamzin

quoth the madman

I’ve been quite miserable. You’d call me selfish — but I feel it more and more; I feel the need to be alone with people who understand without having to try. I need that sense of effortlessness right there — I just refuse to hold back these days. I refuse to settle for some lucidity of mind in my own privacy and then no more energy left, no more vitality left to keep me going. It’s all anxiety and restlessness. And — I find it more and more hard to waste my time on people I don’t truly care about for I feel they don’t care enough either. Or they do care, in their own way, but it’s just not meaningful to me whatsoever. Does it all lie in my complete inability to receive? At any rate, I think they surely like the idea — that’s why they obviously keep coming around for tea! But at this point, I can’t have that — and there’s no point, really, for they don’t understand, ever, and in all my misery I am still pretty arrogant and demanding enough to believe that it is my right to wish to be felt rather than be understood but that doesn’t seem to happen either. So, here it is: is it possible? I ask. Is “emotion” possible without “understanding” of some sort?

– Virginia Woolf, from Selected Letters

quoth the madman

And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.

~Edgar Allan Poe

literacki

Truly a library is a room of dreams.

– Yamashita, Karen Tei. I Hotel.

literacki

"This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exception."

- One Dimensional Man by H. Marcuse

literacki

"People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead."

- James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

literacki

There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

– T.S. Eliot, The Rock

quoth the madman

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

~Noam Chomsky

literacki

"The soul’s like all matter:
why would it stay intact, stay faithful to its one form,
when it could be free?" - Louise Glück, from Lullaby 

ponderous

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The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying ‘anywhere but here’.

E.E. Cummings

quoth the madman

 

Kites rise highest against the wind - not with it.

~Winston Churchill

quoth the madman

 

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

~Charles Dickens

quoth the madman

 

I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.

Leonardo da Vinci

quoth the madman

 

“Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

ponderous

 

“The sun shines not on us but in us.”
― John Muir

quoth the madman

  

 You only demand clarity because you’re too comfortable within your vagueness; You only feel insufficient because you’re extremely fearful of unconditionally caring.
~Albert Camus, Notebooks (1951-1959)

quoth the madman

“Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.”            

— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses

pondering

“I think a person needs to learn from childhood to find himself alone. It means to not be bored when you’re by yourself, because a person who finds himself bored when alone – as it seems to me – is in danger.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky, A Poet in the Cinema

ponderous

“Do we not see all humans unaware
Of what they want, and always searching everywhere,
And changing place, as if to drop the load they bear?”

— Lucretius - On The Nature Of Things

ponder

“Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as true strength.”

— Ralph W. Sockman