quoth the madman

My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me. 

— ابو عبدالله محمد بن إدريس

quoth the madman

Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. 

~Frida Kahlo

literacki

The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us.
~Simon Van Booy, “Everything Beautiful Began After”

ars poetica

Yesterday, I ate a pomegranate
with my bare hands.
One of the seeds
had a perfect
puncture
wound, spitting red juice
up my arm.

For a moment,
I could understand
the grace in monsters.

—Benjamin Clime, ”Pomegranate I.”

quoth the madman

"When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake."

~P.D. Ouspensky

literacki

"One day, perhaps, he will see it all for what it is … a circle, a wheel, something with neither beginning nor end … like the snake that devoured its own tail, and finally, irrevocably disappeared."

~R. J. Ellory, from The Devil and the River

quoth the madman

"No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us."

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

literacki

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That’s why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder. 

~White Cat by Holly Black

literacki

“Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

literacki

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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

quoth the madman

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

literacki

“I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers

quoth the madman

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing 
and rightdoing there is a field.
 I’ll meet you there.
 When the soul lies down in that grass 
the world is too full to talk about."

— Rumi 

pump

quoth the madman

We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realize that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.

— Irvine Welsh

literacki

It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.

— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

quoth the madman

August 2, 1914: Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon.

— Franz Kafka

quoth the madman

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

—  Aldous Huxley

literacki

You have my permission not to love me;
I am a cathedral of deadbolts
and I’d rather burn myself down
than change the locks.

— Rachel McKibbens, “Letter From My Brain To My Heart”

quoth the madman

The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

— Achilles (Troy)

literacki

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.

— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I

here is truth

Action is the antidote to fear.

literacki

Knowing can be a curse on a person’s life. I’d traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn’t know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.

 Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

quoth the madman

If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.

Leonard Cohen

ars poetica

"You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me."—  Emily Dickinson

literacki

"All lights combined to make this darkness."—  Anna Kamienska, from “A Nest of Quiet,”

literacki

"Was it language robbed yes of its yesness?"—  Micheline Aharonian Marcom, A Brief History of Yes

literacki

The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every considering-something-true, is necessarily false cause there simply is no true world. Thus, a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us (in so far as we continually need a narrower, abbreviated, simplified world).

That it is the measure of strength to what extent we can admit to ourselves, without perishing, the merely apparent character, the necessity of lies.
To this extent, nihilism, as the denial of a truthful world, of being, might be a divine way of thinking.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

quoth the madman

She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did.                               

Zelda Fitzgerald

quoth the madman

"Viewed up close, nobody is normal."

Caetano Veloso

quoth the madman

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

T.S. Eliot

quoth the madman

"For each thing we do to change, we do a million to stay the same."

James Richardson

literacki

Boys come and boys go while my imagination has great freedom with it all and my soul stays chained to this damn inactive body.

Arielle King, My Fear is The Devil

literacki

"You want everything so much and when you get it it’s over and you don’t give a damn."

Ernest Hemingway, The Garden Of Eden

literacki

"Her face was just like the landscape—shadows and sunshine flitting over it in rapid succession; but the shadows rested longer, and the sunshine was more transient."

Emily Brontë, from Wuthering Heights

quoth the madman

"The future you shall know when it has come before then forget it."

Aeschylus