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

ars poetica

"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”

ponder

"People are always shouting they want to create a better future.
It’s not true.
The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.
The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it.
The Only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."
~ Milan Kundera

literacki

"Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? …Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience."
John Steinbeck, East of Eden

ponder

"In the world there is nothing more submissive than water.
Yet for attacking that which is hard nothing can surpass it."
~Lao Tzu

ponder

"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home."
-Twyla Tharp

ponder

 

No, your your overall circumstances or condition in life is not a cage. It’s a more like garden, it requires cultivating and the occasional harsh pruning to allow heartier growth...

ponder

"قمة العظمه…..أن تبتسم وفي عينيك الف دمعه…
The pinnacle of excellence is to smile when your eyes have one thousand tears"
~Arabic Proverb

ars poetica

I am fair, O mortals! like a dream carved in stone,
And my breast where each one in turn has bruised himself
Is made to inspire in the poet a love
As eternal and silent as matter.

On a throne in the sky, a mysterious sphinx,
I join a heart of snow to the whiteness of swans;
I hate movement for it displaces lines,
And never do I weep and never do I laugh.
Poets, before my grandiose poses,
Which I seem to assume from the proudest statues,
Will consume their lives in austere study;
For I have, to enchant those submissive lovers,
Pure mirrors that make all things more beautiful:
My eyes, my large, wide eyes of eternal brightness!
— Charles Baudelaire, Beauty, The Flowers of Evil
1861 publication

quoth the madman

Anyone who renounces life because he feels that it is nothing but pain and sorrow and doesn’t find in himself the heroic courage to kill himself is — in my opinion — a grotesque poser and a helpless person…

— Renzo Novatore, Italian Anarchist

literacki

The Bible legend tells us that the absence of toil - idleness - was a condition of the first man’s state of bliss before the Fall.
This love of idleness has remained the same in the fallen man, but the curse still lies heavy on the human race….because our moral nature is such that we are unable to be idle and at peace.

— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

quoth the madman

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. 

He loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.

— Alan Watts 

ponder

Life — for me — is neither good nor bad, neither a theory nor an idea. 

Life is a reality, and the reality of life is war. 

For one who is a born warrior, life is a fountain of joy, for others it is only a fountain of humiliation and sorrow. 

I no longer demand carefree joy from life. It couldn’t give it to me, and I would no longer know what to do with it…

— Renzo Novatore, Italian Anarchist

quoth the madman

I have fallen ill with the same disease as Nietzsche and it displeases me to admit having anything in common with this or the other world. I am restless and neurasthenic. I have an iron hoop on my head that crushes my skull, and my eyes throb in their sockets, swollen and bloody, tired of dreams. I am destined to pass through this world, wandering like an invisible meteor. Precisely because I am superior, I will have to empty the entire cup of sorrow and distress with no joy to cheer me. But the harsh intoxication of drinking from the chalice of sorrow is a superb pleasure that only one who tears his soul to shreds by himself, with his own hands, is given to taste.

— Bruno Filippi, Italian Anarchist

ponderous

I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing. …For one who has lost everything there is nothing left in life except the passion of the absurd. What else in life could still move such a person?

— Emil Cioran, The Passion for the Absurd

quoth the madman

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

— Oscar Wilde

literacki

Where is God, even if he doesn’t exist?
Sometimes at night, when I’m feeling lonely, I call out to him with tears and form an idea of him I can love. But then it occurs to me that I don’t know him, that perhaps he’s not how I imagine, that perhaps this figure has never been the father of my soul…
If only God would one day come and take me to his house and give me warmth and affection…Sometimes I think about this and weep with joy just because I can think about it. But the wind blows down the street, and the leaves fall on the pavement. I lift my eyes and look at the stars, which make no sense at all. And all that remains of this is I…

— Fernando Pessoa, Book of Disquiet 

literacki

Do you know what punishments I’ve endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men’s most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn’t tolerate my existence.

— Brent Weeks, The Way of Shadows

ponder

So direct is my vision, so pure my senses, so clumsily complete my knowledge, and so free, so clear my fancy, and my learning so consummate that I see through myself from the extreme edge of the world to my unspoken word; and from the formless rising thing of desire, along known fibers and through ordered centers, I follow and am myself, answer myself, reflect and echo myself, and quiver to infinity in my mirrors – I am glass.

— Valéry 

ponder

Every word, every thought and every emotion come back to one core problem: life is meaningless… The experiment in nihilism is to seek out and expose every illusion and every myth, wherever it may lead, no matter what, even if it kills us.

— Mitchell Heisman

quoth the madman

He started messing with the Christmas tree, telling me how nice the Christmas tree was. So I shot him.

—David Bullock

literacki

If God does not exist, I am God.

— Dostoevsky ”The Possessed” (1872)

quoth the madman

Where is my faith? Even deep down … there is nothing but emptiness and darkness … If there be God—please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul … How painful is this unknown pain—I have no Faith. Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal, … What do I labor for? If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.

— Mother Teresa (private writings)

pondering

• The narcissist does not occupy his own soul, nor does he inhabit his own body. He is the servant of an apparition, of a reflection, of an Ego function. To please and appease his Master, the narcissist sacrifices to it his very life.
• The narcissist is a man for all seasons, forever adaptable, constantly imitating and emulating, a human sponge, a perfect mirror, a chameleon, a non-entity that is, at the same time, all entities combined.
• Thus, to invest in a narcissist is a purposeless, futile and meaningless activity. To the narcissist, every day is a new beginning, a hunt, a new cycle of idealization or devaluation, a newly invented self. There is no accumulation of credits or goodwill because the narcissist has no past and no future. He occupies an eternal and timeless present. He is a fossil caught in the frozen lava of a volcanic childhood. The narcissist does not keep agreements, does not adhere to laws, regards consistency  and predictability as demeaning traits.
• Even when he seems to be interacting with someone else – the narcissist is actually engaged in a self-referential discourse. To the narcissist, all other people are cardboard cut-outs, two dimensional animated cartoon characters, or symbols. They exist only in his mind. He is startled when they deviate from the script and prove to be complex and autonomous.

— Sam Vaknin

ponder

 

In depression, all that once seemed beautiful, or even startling and dreadful, is nothing to you. The image of a cloud-crossed moon is not in itself a purveyor of anything mysterious or mystical; it is only an ensemble of objects represented to us by our optical apparatus and perhaps processed as a memory.

— Thomas Ligotti

pondered

"Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace."
~Eugene O’Neill

literacki

“Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it.”
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

ponder

 

"I shall not have lived in vain if I teach you in time to realize the rapier of irony is more effective an instrument than the bludgeon of insolence."
~Somerset Maugham- The Magician

Like Hacks

Dear employer, I will have to take the day off today because:
☐ It’s December and the streets are papier-mached with wet bronze leaves and it’s so dark outside that the cars have their headlights on at 3pm

☐ I have recently been through a breakup, or I have been through a breakup at any time in my life really, and I woke up today with the absolute conviction that I will never be loved again and I am out of ice cream
☐ A dog looked at me
☐ I got a text from someone for whom I feel a mix of concern and frustration and recognition and longing that is both more and less than romance
☐ Someone made a joke about dead pets meeting you in heaven
☐ It's Daylight savings time and my inner farmer has awakened
☐ I passed a knot of flowers that were so bright they glowed through the dim grey water of the day and when was anything in my life last that luminous?
☐ For the first time I genuinely comprehend that there is not enough time to have all the lives I wanted and besides I need to shop for a new coat
☐ I accidentally listened to Leonard Cohen
☐ Hot dudes need me to watch them spank it on Skype

ponder

 

Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει

All is flux, and nothing abides.

-Heraclitus

(c. 535-475BC)

the play's the thing

“Princess, the age of some people can only be calculated by the level of… rot in them. And by that measure, I’m ancient.”
— Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth

ponder

While melancholy is a state of vague dreaminess, never deep or intense, sadness is closed, serious, and painfully interiorized. One can be sad anywhere, but sadness grows in intensity in a closed space while melancholy flourishes in open spaces. Sadness almost always stems from a precise motive and is therefore concentrated, whereas there are no exterior causes for melancholy. I know why I am sad, but I do not know why I am melancholy.

— Emil Cioran, On Sadness

ponder

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes.
Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly.
Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.
What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.
Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
~Henry Miller

ponder

We can laugh at the ignorance of the world, or cry over it... but inevitably in the end we will regret both...

quoth the madman

“Shame on the man who goes to his grave, escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.”
— Emil Cioran

ponder

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.
— Anne Sexton

ponder

To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god...

ponder

To burn with a deep human desire and never acting on it is not only the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves, it is a blasphemous affront to our Creator.

ponder

A reflection sometimes exposes more reality than the object it echoes.
~The Cheshire Cat ~ Alice in Wonderland

ponder

 

“In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.”
― Benjamin Franklin

ponder

"It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies."
— Foucault

quoth the madman

 

"Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate… but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins."

— Franz Kafka

pondering

 

"He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being."
— Jean-Paul Sartre in The Age of Reason (1945)

ponderous

 

"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.)

quoth the madman

"If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?"
— Soren Kierkegaard

quoth the madman

“Freedom is measured by the resistance that needs to be overcome and the effort that it costs to stay on top.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

ponder

Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow appeared there and formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that’s how things work.

If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.
— Brian Eno

ponderous

Nature is forgetful: the world is almost more so. 

However little the individual may lend himself to it, oblivion soon covers him like a shroud. 

This rapid and inexorable expansion of the universal life, which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual being, which effaces our existence and annuls all memory of us, fills me with unbearable melancholy. 

To be born, to struggle, to disappear—there is the whole ephemeral drama of human life. 

Except in a few hearts, and not even always in one, our memory passes like a ripple on the water, or a breeze in the air.

 If nothing in us is immortal, what a small thing is life.

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime 

ponder

Because of their narcissism, geniuses are often solitary and friendless. “I have no friends,” said Michelangelo, “need none, and will have none”; Michelangelo was said to be “lonely as a hangman.” A woman who knew Kierkegaard and Ibsen said, “I have never seen in any other two persons, male or female, so marked a compulsion to be alone.”

—  L. James Hammond, Conversations With Great Thinkers

ponder

"I had a most pleasurable conversation with a rather handsome man about, of all things, the return of astrology as a reliable source of matchmaking, you know, by figuring out someones personality- without all that time spent chatting away mano a mano over countless bottles of (shudder) inexpensive wine. Boxed even.
Choosing a rather perilously low divan - because as you know I have the kind of figure that is well suited for reclining among cushions- I chatted away with the aforementioned gentleman, a certain French celebrity of sorts, almost half my age yet well beyond the age of reason with dancing golden brown eyes and muscular pecs to match and hair the color of neglected brass, you know who I mean, don't be coy.
A one point in our conversation about astrology, he lifted the glass filled with amber liquid, holding it, regarding it as though looking at me through a lorgnette, and said in a throaty accent: "You know cheri, you could have saved many a Grand Duke or Saudi Prince from finding himself in the fearful midnight hour, pouring his heart out in a letter filled with his unrequited passion before then turning to the service revolver lying on the table simply by comparing your astrological signs first..."
I realized how right he was - beautiful people so often are- So here is a bit of a run down of signs and their somewhat cliche personality traits for your careful study; mix and match like IHOP syrups to find your own Cheri amour.

Capricorn December 22 -January 19
Tends to be very private and as a result learns little about real life. Tends to be passive aggressive. Tendency for show-boating, especially in their careers. Best as child. Famous Capricorns: Jesus, Marilyn Manson, Susan Lucci.
.
Aquarius January 20 -February 18
Creative and modern thinking. Often mistaken for not-to-bright. Does not learn from experience. Likes shiny objects and/or other peoples husbands/wives. Famous Aquarians: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Dan Quale, Sharon Tate.
.
Pisces February 19 -March 20
Emotionally powerful if a bit paranoid Makes up by being a bully for what lacks in real bravery. Has no pets but complex imaginary friends instead. Famous Pisceans: Jack Kerouac, Patty Hearst, Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
.
Aries March 21 -April 19
Tendency toward being outdoorsy and independent, or at least dresses the part. Walks away rather than have a decent discussion. Better without progeny. Makes excellent Sherpa. Famous Arians: Joan Crawford, William Shatner, Debbie Reynolds.
.
Taurus April 20 -May 20
Great stick-with-it-ness. Often quite successful later in life- usually by crooked means. Famous Taurians: Prescott Bush, Adolf Hitler, Jim Jones.
.
Gemini May 21 -June 20
Dual nature. Intelligent if schizophrenic. Neither aspect of personality admirable. Fast at making deals, Fast at loosing friends/shirt. Famous Geminis: Jeffery Dahmer, King George III, Paula Abdul.
.
Cancer June 21 -July 22
A good listener and quite easy to take advantage of. Wildly emotional, barely able to function in an adult environment. Tendency toward deep seated sexual infantilism. Famous Cancers: Lizzie Bordon, P.T. Barnum, George W. Bush.
.
Leo July 23 -August 22
Clever. Stubborn and forceful. Pulls wool over others eyes as a hobby. Seems to listen but doesn't really care. Makes good cop. Famous Leos: Miss Cleo, Aldous Huxley, Madonna.
.
Virgo August 23 -September 22
Weighs facts carefully often resulting in complete inaction. Obsessively clean and therefore hard to be with because of it. Whines a lot. Famous Virgos: Queen Elizabeth I, Upton Sinclair, Josie and The Pussycats.
.
Libra September 23 -October 22
Sensitive to music, art and literature. Happy completely alone much to the delight of everyone. Famous Libras: Truman Capote, Mark Rothko, Al Sharpton.
.
Scorpio October 23 -November 21
Sneaky. One way sensitivity. Easily hurt, but unconscious of other peoples feelings. Makes excellent file clerk or fascist rebel. Famous Scorpios: Fedor Dostoevsky, Tonya Harding, Charles Manson.
.
Sagittarius November 22 -December 21
Wide open. Gives too much information on personal matters but also otherwise known to take creative liberties with The Truth. Sees the bright side of everything however senseless. Known to follow lemmings. Famous Sagittarius's: Nostradamus, Catherine of Aragon, Jay Bakker.

There now... all better? Hmmm, you're welcome, all for science...
Cheers."