quoth the madman

"I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."— Pablo Neruda

quoth the madman

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and call it fate.”

~ C.G. Jung

 

quoth the madman

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions… are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

quoth the madman

She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.
~Carl Sagan

quoth the madman

 

“It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.”
― Adlai E. Stevenson II

the play's the thing

"And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays."
~William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

quoth the madman

"When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone."

~Tennesee Williams

quoth the madman

"We have one party - we have the party of essentially corporate America. It has two right wings, one called Democratic, one called Republican."
~Gore Vidal

quoth the madman

"I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say."

~T.S. Eliot

literacki

"Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?"

~Henry James, The Ambassador

quoth the madman

"Anyone who loves in the expectation of being loved in return is wasting their time."
Paulo Coelho

quoth the madman

 "Happy ending? There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part. So just give me a happy middle and a very happy start."
Shel Silverstein

literacki

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

literacki

"The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for."

— from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

literacki

Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

literacki

“At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren’t listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don’t see how your gestures already mirror his; you don’t see him in the way you sign your name. You don’t hear his whisper in your blood.”

- “East, West”, Salman Rushdie

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It was good, and nothing good is truly lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of their character. So part of you goes everywhere with me. And part of me is yours, forever.

Rosamunde Pilcher, The Shell Seekers

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I shall not exist if you do not imagine me.
~Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

literacki

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.
~Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

literacki

"Identity is not so much apprehending a face as winning it over."

— Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion

literacki

A million years of evolution and what are we? Animals.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

quoth the madman

All perception is really self-perception because you can only recognize that which is within you.

Almine

quoth the madman

When the mind becomes still you are in the kingdom of the infinite.

~ Paramhansa Yogananda

quoth the madman

Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Vladimir Nabokov

quoth the madman

Do not confuse beauty with beautiful. Beautiful is a human judgment. Beauty is All. The difference is everything.

Matthew Fox

quoth the madman

What could be more futile, more insane,
than to create inner resistance to something that already is?

Eckhart Tolle

ars poetica

"There is the world—
Storm-windowed, or curtained in the summer wind—
That I have watched and wished to live within."

— Randall Jarrell, from “Windows”

ars poetica

Sorrow flow through me in tiny waves of shivers.
~Cocorosie, from “Werewolf”

ars poetica

His skin
is a brutally beautiful
handwritten letter
from the sun.

~Buddy Wakefield, from “Human the death dance”

ars poetica

"This limitless Hyperbole
Each one of us shall be —
‘Tis Drama — if Hypothesis
It be not Tragedy —"

— Emily Dickinson, from “[1481]”

quoth the madman

Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad, except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up

-Orson Welles

ars poetica

"Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies."

— Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Burning the Old Year”

ars poetica

"...whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek (forgetting find)
and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me ,remember me"
— e. e. cummings

quoth the madman

Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.

Albert Einstein

ars poetica

Come to my quietness
I shall cover you with it, like
a white sheet that has blown all day in
the sun, like a mountain lake
filled with spring, it shall slip over you…

Diane di Prima

literacki

I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.

John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent