quoth the madman

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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"What a weary time those years were — to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability."

~ Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

quoth the madman

"Every day, I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it."

— Claude Monet

quoth the madman

"La tristesse durera toujours"

"The sadness will never die"

~Vincent Van Gogh's last words

quoth the madman

Why are we here, that is the question… In this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting.

~Samuel Beckett

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"Strange: inability to be alone, inability not to be alone. One accepts both. Both profit."

~ Albert Camus - Notebooks

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"Let us shut off the wireless and listen to the past."
— Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

ars poetica

"And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm."

— Dylan Thomas, from “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”

ars poetica

"Hey, wait.
Well, love after all is a habit like any other.
A habit, maybe. Like any other, no."

— Renata Adler, Pitch Dark

here is truth

Make the space and things will come that fill it perfectly.

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Spiritual progress is made through confronting death and calamity. — Instead of averting your eyes from the painful events of life, look at them squarely and contemplate them often. By facing the realities of death, infirmity, loss, and disappointment, you free yourself of illusions and false hopes and you avoid miserable, envious thoughts.

The Art of Living by Epictetus

quoth the madman

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem apellant.

“To pillaging, massacre, plunder, they give the false name “empire”; and, where they have made desolation, they name it peace!”
- Tacitus, Of the Life and Death of Julius Agricola, XXX

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May I recommend serenity to you? A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment. Learn to be one with the joy of the moment.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

ars poetica

Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Hafiz

ars poetica

Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.
~Andrea Gibson

quoth the madman

Every moment is a poem if you hold it right.
~Lauren Zuniga

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 I have a very old and very faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive.

— Albert Camus; The Fall

quoth the madman

I am not like other people.
I am burning in hell.
The hell of myself.
~Charles Bukowski

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I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals

quoth the madman

Yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.

Laurie Halse Anderson

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live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. it doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. if you haven’t had that, what have you had?
~Henry James, The Ambassadors

quoth the madman

People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.
~Charles Bukowski

quoth the madman

The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do.

Galileo Galilei

quoth the madman

The Master is Hollow like a cave; Confused like a muddy pool; And yet who else could quietly and gradually evolve from the muddy to the clear?
- Lao Tzu

quoth the madman

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

John W. Gardner

quote

Why do you live in your body like you will be given another? As if it were temporary.
You starve it, you let people abuse it, you berate it. You tell it that should be completely different. You tug at your soft flesh, wish it thinner, wish it gone. You fall in love with those who praise the way it sighs under their hands, but who praises the way it holds up your weight, even when you are falling apart?

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 "The highest form of self awareness is realizing you’re just a character in someone else’s dream."

~Richard Linklater, Waking Life

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"It is not down on any map; true places never are."
~Herman Melville, Moby Dick

quoth the madman

 "Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry."

~Jack Kerouac

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"Once freedom explodes in the human soul, God can do nothing against man. God can do nothing against this pillar of granite, against this irresistible column — man’s freedom."

~ Jean-Paul Sartre - The Flies

quoth the madman

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

~ Seneca

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Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.

~ Fernando Pessoa - A Factless Biography

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Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

— Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf