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

“I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.”

—   Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

ponderous:

 

“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

 

“Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.”

—   Nikos Kazantzakis,

ars poetica

There is a silence where hath been no sound,
 There is a silence where no sound may be,
 In the cold grave—under the deep, deep sea,
Or in wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound.

—      Hood, Sonnets. Silence.

ponder

"Some foolish men declare that creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill advised and should be rejected.
If God created the world, where was he before the creation? If you say he was transcendent then and needed no support, where is he now?

How could God have made this world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression.
If you declare that this raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, for the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have arisen quite naturally.
If God created the world by an act of his own will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else — and who will believe this silly nonsense?
If he is ever perfect and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could.
If he is form-less, action-less and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all modality, would have no desire to create anything.
If he is perfect, he does not strive for the three aims of man, so what advantage would he gain by creating the universe?
If you say that he created to no purpose because it was his nature to do so, then God is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble.
If he created because of the karma of embodied beings (acquired in a previous creation), then he is not the Almighty Lord, but subordinate to something else.
If out of love for living beings and need of them he made the world, why did he not make creation wholly blissful free from misfortune?
If he were transcendent he would not create, for he would be free: Nor if involved in transmigration, for then he would not be almighty. Thus the doctrine that the world was created by God makes no sense at all.
And God commits great sin in slaying the children whom he himself created. If you say that he slays only to destroy evil beings, why did he create such beings in the first place?
Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine. Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning or end, and is based on the principles, life and rest. Uncreated and indestructible, it endures under the compulsion of its own nature."
~ Ācārya Jinasena in Mahāpurāna - Jain opposition to Creationism- (which was quoted by Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos)

ponder

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

 

literacki

Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.

— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

 

A la recherche du temps perdu:

"The look of things has a great power over me."

—  Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 12 August 1928

A la recherche du temps perdu:

"I hate solitude, but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction"

—  Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

A la recherche du temps perdu:

"But I know that my whole consciousness, my very existence, depends on regaining my memory. Without memory there’s no continuity, no reality, no perspective on my life, no I am."

—  Jens Bjørneboe, Moment of Freedom

A la recherche du temps perdu:

“Danger is a biologic necessity, like dreams.”
— Burroughs, The Western Lands

A la recherche du temps perdu:

"Anxiety, as we know, is always connected with a loss…"

—  Jacques Lacan, “Fetishism” in Perversions, Psychodynamics, and Therapy

A la recherche du temps perdu:

"I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters."

—  Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

A la recherche du temps perdu:

"‘Need,’ from the High German, for danger.
'Murmur,’ from the Sanskrit, a crackling fire."

—  Monica Youn, from “Blackacre”

A la recherche du temps perdu:

"What torture it is to hold on to reason as desire intensifies."

—  Belén Gopegui, The Scale of Maps, trans. Mark Schafer

A la recherche du temps perdu:

"I cannot give the reality of facts, I can only present its shadow."

—  Stendhal, epigraph to Patrick Modiano’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood

A la recherche du temps perdu:

"Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love."

—  George Eliot, Middlemarch

ponder

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

— Janet Frame, Faces in the Water

ponder

“All the stupidity and the arbitrariness of the laws, all the pain of the initiations, the whole perverse apparatus of repression and education, the red-hot irons, and the atrocious procedures have only this meaning: to discipline man, to mark him in his flesh, to render him capable of alliance, to form him within the debtor-creditor relation, which on both sides turns out to be a matter of memory - a memory straining toward the future.”

— Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus p. 207-208

pondering

“We are mortals, you and I. There is only my dying and your dying and nothing beyond. You will die and there is nothing beyond. I shall slowly disappear until my heart stops its soft padding against the lining of my chest. Until then, the drive to speak continues, incessantly. Until then, we carry on. After that, there is nothing.”

— Simon Critchley, Very Little… Almost Nothing

truthiness

"If we could conserve the energy we lavish in that series of dreams we nightly leave behind us, the mind’s depth and subtlety would reach unimaginable proportions. The scaffolding of a nightmare requires a nervous expenditure more exhausting than the best articulated theoretical construction. How, after waking begin again the task of aligning ideas when, in our unconscious, we were mixed up with grotesque and marvelous spectacles, we were sailing among the spheres without the shackles of anti-poetic Causality? For hours we were like drunken gods – and suddenly, our open eyes erasing night’s infinity, we must resume, in day’s mediocrity, the enterprise of insipid problems, without any of the night’s hallucinations to help us. The glorious and deadly fantasy was all for nothing then; sleep has exhausted us in vain. Waking, another kind of weariness awaits us; after having had just enough time to forget the night’s, we are at grips with the dawn’s. We have labored hours and hours in horizontal immobility without our brain’s deriving the least advantage of its absurd activity. After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. Thus sleep’s labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets…"

— Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay, “Overworked by Dreams,” page 54.

ponder

"So long as man is protected by madness, he functions and flourishes; but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined."

— Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay, “The Flower of Fixed Ideas,” page 62.

ponder

Some people in your life
Touch you so very deeply
That you drown totally in that depth.

— Amit Abraham

literacki

Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.

— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

 

pondering

Memories do not change, and change is the law of existence. If our dead, the closest, the most beloved, were to return to us after a long absence and instead of the old, familiar trees were to find in our souls English gardens and stone walls — that is to say, other loves, other tastes, other interests, they would gaze upon us sadly and tenderly for a moment, wiping away their tears, and then return to their tombs to rest.

— Teresa de la Parra, Las memorias de Mamá Blanca

ars poetica

And all the winds go sighing,
For sweet things dying

— Christina Rossetti, from “A Dirge”

 

ars poetica

 

Language is a long rope,
intricately wound and knotted
around our bodies
from the moment we are born
until the day we die.

Why wouldn’t I use it,
pull it tight and twist it,
sew you into place with words,
use my voice to open you
and mark you mine.

ponder

Altruism is for those who can’t endure their desires. There’s a world as ambiguous as a moan, a pleasure moan our earnest neighbors might think a crime. It’s where we could live. I’ll say I love you, Which will lead, of course, to disappointment, but those words unsaid poison every next moment. I will try to disappoint you better than anyone else has.

— Stephen Dunn , Different Hours

 

literacki

I love no one but you, I have discovered, but you are far away and I am here alone. Then this is my life and maybe, however unlikely, I’ll find my way back there. Or maybe, one day, I’ll settle for second best. And on that same day, hell will freeze over, the sun will burn out and the stars will fall from the sky.

— Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events

 

 

quoth the madman

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.

— Vladimir Nabokov

 

literacki

Like a man at the edge of the depths, attracted equally to the current of objects and the whirlpools of his own being; let us pause at this strange zone where all is distraction, distraction of attention as well as inattention, so as to experience this vertigo.

— Louis Aragon, Le Passage de l’opéra, Le Paysan de Paris

 

literacki

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

 

quoth the madman

Please — consider me a dream.

— Franz Kafka

 

ponder

the best part was
pulling down the
shades
stuffing the doorbell
with rags
putting the phone
in the
refrigerator
and going to bed
for 3 or 4
days.

— From Escape by Charles Bukowski

ars poetica

I’ve dreamed of you so much
it’s no longer right
for me to waken.

— Robert Desnos, from I’ve Dreamed of You So Much

pondering

No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

— Vladimir Nabokov. Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

 

literacki

I’m not sentimental–I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last–the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 

ponder

‘You reach a point,’ she wrote me once, ‘where you cannot cry anymore, and you look around you at people you know, at people your own age, and they’re not crying either. Something has been taken. And they are emptier. And they are grateful.’

— Lorrie Moore, What Is Seized

 

ponderous

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

— Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

ponder

Re-create yourselves: and let this be your best creation.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

literacki

In the mirror of reality, of the unbeautiful world, it is hardly reassuring and requires much strength of character to look and see oneself.

— Arthur Miller, Focus

 

ponder

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

ponder

You are terrifying and strange and beautiful. Something not everyone knows how to love.

— Warsan Shire

 

literacki

You can’t shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don’t know.

— Janet Fitch, White Oleander

 

ponder

You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she’s dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty.

— Nick McDonell, “Twelve”

 

pondering

You and I have always had complex dreams that open
up into new conjoined universes that explode
on impact and make us groggy in the morning,
groping for our oversized coffee mugs.
New exercises for new muscles. Gargling. Dilation.
A double dose of happy hygiene. Good
morning, honey. Our beaks clack when we kiss.

— From A Perfect Marriage by Jamey Gallagher

literacki

I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?

— Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

 

ponder

I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.

— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

 

literacki

"Why do we hunger so for vicious things?"

- Robert Lowell, from The Vanity Of Human Wishes

pondering

How dare the world be beautiful when I was so horrifying?

— Rachel Hartman, Seraphina

 

ponder

We are all deep in a hell, each moment of which is a miracle.

— Rob Doyle, “Winter in Paris”

ars poetica

I would feed you a lie,
    
one of the little ones—the kind that turns
strangers to lovers, that turns words to poems.

— Gary Jackson, from “Listening to Plath in Poetics,” in Missing You, Metropolis

ponderous

A tongue will wrestle its mouth to death and lose—
      language is a cemetery.

— Natalie Diaz, from “Cloud Watching,” When My Brother Was an Aztec

ponder

Some people are magic, and others are just the illusion of it.

— Beau Taplin

 

ars poetica

What can you seek now
To make your heart still sing?

— Langston Hughes, from “Old Age”

literacki

[…] and your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

— William Faulkner, from Absalom, Absalom!

ponderous

40 Fortunes

1. There isn’t an ocean for a thousand miles, but that doesn’t mean this
   isn’t the beach.
2. At the necessary moment, going naked will be your most convincing
   disguise.
3. If you can fix a lawn mower with a pen knife, you are a funny old
   man.
4. Desert crossings are impressive only if the desert has been given
   an ominous name. Go forth and name your deserts.
5. Only fools ride the train facing backwards.
6. Among life’s great injustices: no commemorative stamp has been
   issued in your honor, while several have been for Muppets.
7. Rare is the picnic that doesn’t spread itself atop a snowman cemetery.
8. If you’re alive enough to feel lighter, then the appendectomy was a
   success.
9. Muppets, appendectomy, snowman: the longer a list grows, the
   more suspicious its lacunae.
10. Years from now, you will need this combination to escape: Right:
   23. Left: 14. Right: 8.
11. No matter who walks with you into the woods, you walk into the
   woods alone.
12. Your Nature Number is 27. Your Destiny Number is 14. Your idea of
   a decent stir fry is an abomination.
13. Here is the name of the person who truly loves you the most:
                                                                                           .
14. Life is full of little disappointments. The country of Turkey has no
   state bird.
15. Art is the uneraseable image: on your mother’s kitchen counter, a
   bouquet of knives.
16. You don’t realize how cruel you can be. Do you find bandanas funny
   simply because poor people use them as handkerchiefs?
17. Accident is as sure a path to insight as will. The inventor of the
   typewriter, for instance, was trying to create a prosthetic for the
   blind.
18. Every bridge gives the traveler two destinations, though one is
   always retreat.
19. Do not reveal your deceit lest you reduce it to mere crime.
20. The dream state is the only beautiful form of suffocation.
21. With friends by your side, fight with your fists. With a wall at your
   back, fight with compliments.
22. The ploughman prays for rain; the roof of your mouth for the pizza
   to cool; what are our thirties supposed to be good for again?
23. “That was the audition,” says the avant-garde director, “and you
   nailed it! We’re looking to cast someone who knows how to stand
   in line nervously.”
24. Your life, like a Ferris Wheel, will ultimately deliver you facing
   backwards at a destination that looks suspiciously similar to your
   initial point of departure.
25. “Daddy, I’m afraid of dying,” says the little girl. “But there’s nothing
   to be afraid of, silly,” says the father, suddenly terrified of his child.
26. God is the only one among us who has mastered invisibility. This
   space has been intentionally left blank.
27. “Son, I am not really your father,” says the old man. “Father,”
   responds the young man, “it’s too late.”
28. Bald men know.
29. If that cloud looks like a lion, what does a lion look like? Answer: the
   statues outside the museum. People used to go there to see what a
   naked lady looks like.
30. We fuck what we think we lack.
31. Write your phone number here:                                   . Drop this
   in public. Something wonderful is about to happen.
32. Show a scientist the moon and he’ll tell you how it got there. Show
   a poet the moon and he’ll start thinking about your wife.
33. Read frequently, but beware of being read to, too close it is to being
   told what to do.
34. Do not aspire to be the tiger. Aspire to be the sparrow who knows
   how to sit upon the tiger’s back.
35. “No ideas but in things,” reads our guidebook as we continue to
   refine our list: moon, sparrow, tiger’s back.
36. A one-line poem called “Upon Leaving the Infertility Clinic”:
   Six times I tried to tie my necktie, and not once did I get it right.
37. The reporter of any miracle tells a lie.
38. You don’t have to travel farther than the birth canal to be born a
   wanderer.
39. Let the leaves forget the tune that the wind can never quite blow.
   Then forget the leaves.
40. Beware of the wolves. They’ve been raised by wolves.

ponder

Be careful. There are people out there who will look at your love only as a place to put their pain.

— Beau Taplin