~Virginia Woolf
quoth the madman
ponder
~Chinese Proverb
literacki
"That feeling, it’s got no touch with how things are in the day. It was a night kind of knowing, like when you wake up in the dark and hear your own name, your own voice – and then when you get beyond that, when you get to calling a name that’s not your own, but that’s got even more of what’s you in it, more of what’s got your heart…"
- Sidney Beckett, from Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography
▼
pondering
~Maya Angelou
ars poetica
hoping they will train me in the art
of opening up
~Shane Koyczan, The Student
pondering
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man, true nobility is being superior to your former self.
Ernest Hemingway
literacki
I’d try to explain that it’s not really negativity or sadness anymore, it’s more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can’t feel anything about anything — even the things you love, even fun things — and you’re horribly bored and lonely.
~Allie Brosh/Hyperbole and a Half, Depression Part Two
literacki
Cease trembling and shaking and gasping
and cursing and find again your core which I am.
Rest from twistedness, distortion, deformations.
For an hour you will be me; that is, the other
half of yourself. The half you lost.
What you burnt, broke, and tore is still
in my hands: I am the keeper of fragile things
and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.
~Anaïs Nin, from House Of Incest
ponderous
“It’s on days like this that one has an empty feeling when one can go nowhere and nobody comes. But it’s then that I feel how much the work means to me, how it gives tone to life, apart from approval or disapproval; and on days which would otherwise make one melancholy, one is glad to have a will.”
— Vincent van Gogh
ponder
literacki
— James Joyce, Ulysses
quoth the madman
— Hermann Hesse
quoth the madman
— Anton Chekhov
quoth the madman
“Important encounters are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.”
— Paolo Coelho
literacki
“The world breaks every one and afterward many are stronger at the broken places.”
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
ponder
— John Irving, A Prayer For Owen Many
ponderous
“I sat watching a flower as it was withering. I was embarrassed by its honesty.”
— Conor Oberst
ponder
"The dream is too often about myself. To correct this; and to forget one’s own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practise anonymity. Silence in company…"
— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 22 December 1927
quoth the madman
"How I yearn to throw myself into endless space and float above the awful abyss."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
ponderous
"Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption."
— André Bazin
ars poetica
"There is no other immortality:
in the cold spring, the purple violets open.
And yet, the heart is black,
there is its violence frankly exposed.
Or is it not the heart at the center
but some other word?"
— Louise Glück, from “Hyacinth”
in the cold spring, the purple violets open.
And yet, the heart is black,
there is its violence frankly exposed.
Or is it not the heart at the center
but some other word?"
pondering
"The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light’s great
triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun—
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass."
— Joseph Stroud, “Night in Day”
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light’s great
triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun—
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass."
literacki
"‘Ah,’ replied M. de Charlus, with the transcendent smile of the intellectual who does not even take the trouble to hide that he is making fun, but who anyway feels so superior to other people, and so despises the intelligence of those who are least stupid, that he hardly differentiates between those who are the most stupid, as soon as they can be agreeable to him in some other fashion."
— Marcel Proust, Sodom et Gomorrhe
ponderous
"To hold one’s breath would be to drown
in order to avoid drowning."
— Rusty Morrison, from “in the decision of a beginning [3]”
in order to avoid drowning."
literacki
"The photos, like memory, play the possible against the real, play at reviving as possibility what has been. And only revive grief."
— Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence
quoth the madman
- The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.
quoth the madman
~Oscar Wilde
quoth the madman
~Oscar Wilde
quoth the madman
~Oscar Wilde
quoth the madman
- It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.
- ~Oscar Wilde
ponder
"…Death, before weighing to heavily upon us, enriches us, our powers grow at its contact; then, it performs its work of destruction upon us. The evidence of the uselessness of all effort, and that sensation of a future corpse already rising into the present and filling time’s horizon, end by benumbing our ideas, our hopes, and our muscles, so that the excess of energy provoked by the quite recent obsession is converted – when that obsession is irrevocably implanted in the mind – into a stagnation of our vitality. Thus this obsession incites us to become everything and nothing…[It] transforms us into that kind of decomposed hero who promises everything and accomplishes nothing: idle men wasting their breath in the Void; vertical carrion whose sole activity is reduced to thinking that they will cease to be…"
— Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay
ponderous
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up
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— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sensible Thing
pondering
— John Keats, Letters to Benjamin Bailey
quoth the madman
— Edgar Allen Poe
ponder
"To live signifies to believe and to hope – to lie and to lie to oneself. This is why the most truthful image ever created of man remains that of the Knight of the Doleful Countenance, that Don whom we find in even the most fulfilled of the sages."
— Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay
literacki
Whoever truly wishes to become a philosopher will, ‘for once in his life,’ have to fall back on himself and, within himself, try to overturn all the sciences so far accepted and attempt to reconstruct them."
▼Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
quoth the madman
"If identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have
relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new
friendships, it is useful. But if identity becomes the problem of sexual
existence, and if people think that they have to “uncover” their “own
identity,” and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is "Does this thing conform to my identity?“ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation."
relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new
friendships, it is useful. But if identity becomes the problem of sexual
existence, and if people think that they have to “uncover” their “own
identity,” and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is "Does this thing conform to my identity?“ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation."
▼Michel Foucault
ponder
"I’m sure that all this, I mean other people’s attitudes towards me, lies principally in some obscure intrinsic flaw in my own temperament. Perhaps I communicate a coldness that unwittingly obliges others to reflect back my own lack of feeling."
~Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
pondering
"But that’s what we all are–just stories. We only exist by how people remember us, by the stories we make of our lives. Without the stories, we’d just fade away."
▼Charles de Lint, from Memory & Dream
quoth the madman
“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
quoth the madman
“To experience a thing as beautiful means to experience it necessarily wrongly.”
— Nietzsche
quoth the madman
“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
ponder
Existentialism and Determinism.
Sartre may say, and indeed does say, that his meaning is that man has no essence antecedently to his free choices, to the essence he creates freely; but since he is able to delimit man as the object of his existential analysis in such a way that chickens are excluded, it is difficult to take him altogether seriously or to suppose that the proposition, “existence precedes essence,” amounts to much more than an emphatic assertion of liberty and an emphatic denial of any form of physical or psychological determinism.
ponder
“No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”
— Nietzsche, 1892, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
quoth the madman
“In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.”
— Jean-Paul Sarte
literacki
“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (P. 21)
pondering
“The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never regard a grand passion as a destructive torrent upon which a man is swept into uncertain actions as by fate, and which, therefore is an excuse for them.”
— Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism”
ponder
“All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought , ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics - in myths, to be sure, but myths with no other depth than that of human suffering and like it inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion.”
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (P. 87)
All is not chaos; the experience of the absurd is the proof of man’s uniqueness and the foundation of his dignity and freedom.
All is not chaos; the experience of the absurd is the proof of man’s uniqueness and the foundation of his dignity and freedom.
ponder
Sisyphus Dabbles in Haiku
Condemned by the gods
Bound in perpetuity
Bastards hold a grudge
Slanted light of dawn
Stirs the twice-damned dead to rise
Bagel. Coffee, black.
Some things are certain
Death and taxes, for instance
Also, gravity
Summit within reach
Just a few more inches—whoops!
There it goes again
The ascent is hard
But the descent’s not half bad
It’s the little things
Day in and day out
Tiresome toil from dawn to dusk
What am I, Amish?
I bear my burden
As a postman bears his load
Civil, but half-mad
“Orange” is pretty bad
But nothing—I mean nothing—
Rhymes with “Tartarus”
Bound in perpetuity
Bastards hold a grudge
Slanted light of dawn
Stirs the twice-damned dead to rise
Bagel. Coffee, black.
Some things are certain
Death and taxes, for instance
Also, gravity
Summit within reach
Just a few more inches—whoops!
There it goes again
The ascent is hard
But the descent’s not half bad
It’s the little things
Day in and day out
Tiresome toil from dawn to dusk
What am I, Amish?
I bear my burden
As a postman bears his load
Civil, but half-mad
“Orange” is pretty bad
But nothing—I mean nothing—
Rhymes with “Tartarus”
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