this teetering croquembouche of impudence: May 2016

pondering

“Sometimes I’m certain
those who are happy
know one thing more than us…
or one thing less. ”

—Anne Michaels, from “The Weight of Oranges”

ponder

“Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is. ”

—Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

quoth the madman

“It was probably nothing but it felt like the world. ”

—Morrissey, Autobiography (p. 141)

literacki

“Never in my life have I feared death as much as I feared that resurrection. ”

—Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ

ponderous

“We are ghosts, hungry for something bigger than what our lips are kissing ”

—Anis Mojgani, The Branches are Full and These Orchards are Heavy

quoth the madman

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all

~Friedrich Nietzsche

quoth the madman

“Everything you do leaves traces, doesn’t it. The life you’ve lived is written all over you, for those who can read. ”

—Jo Nesbø

ars poetica

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place. ”

—Emily Dickinson

ars poetica

“Like a snake, my heart
has shed its skin.
I hold it here in my hand,
full of honey and wounds. ”

—Federico Garcia Lorca, New Heart

The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage. Michel de Montaigne
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/michel_de_montaigne.html

“I wish I were not more than this, a written pulse, a hushed whisper of thought, braced against the great nothing. For what am I but an elaborate case for my consciousness?”

jhlumyk, section I of “Sunday as it was”

It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor. Michel de Montaigne
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/michel_de_montaigne.html

quoth the madman

servicebear:
“Follow The Feeding Frenzy @ ServiceBear. Thanks to my Followers and the Source of this re-blogged post.
”

“Beware the lollipop of mediocrity; lick it once and you’ll suck forever. ”

—Brian Wilson

“No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic. No more of my eyes, mouths, noses, moods, bad angles. No more yawns, teeth, wrinkles. I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would have allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I’m watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves. Turn the page: you, looking, are newly confused. You know me too well to know me. Or not too well: too much. ”

—Margaret Atwood, The Tent

ponderous

“The scene is memory and is therefore non-realistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. ”

—Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

ponder

“But I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation. ”

—Lord Byron, in a letter to Thomas Moore

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul. Michel de Montaigne
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/michel_de_montaigne_3.html

ponder

“You’re a strand of dark thread
stitching a word to a river. Then another.”

Catherine Abbey Hodges, closing lines to “How to Begin,” Instead of Sadness

literacki

But in the wood there were powers in wait for her: the troubled hush of a thousand fir-trees; a light so changed, so subdued from its own lively ardour to the dark solemnity of that which it had entered, that the child’s spirit, brooding and responsive, went out from her and was liberated.

Nan Shepherd, from The Quarry Wood (E.P. Dutton & Co., 1928)

ponder

“I wish I were not more than this, a written pulse, a hushed whisper of thought, braced against the great nothing. For what am I but an elaborate case for my consciousness?”

jhlumyk, section I of “Sunday as it was”

ponder

“It could be that I choose painful subjects because such sterility, human sterility, and loneliness, is part of so many modern landscapes. By this I mean the shopping mall, the suburbs, the business loops, the freeways and boutiques with cute names. They are all part of a modern reality that I would prefer to forget, or ignore. To most people I suppose such landscapes are slight, and unmenacing. To me they are the death of the landscape, and the eye’s starvation. Therefore, the asylum, the steel mill, the cemetery, the ghost on the riverbank, the dying resort beside the unfading Pacific are locations, for me of a human fertility within time.”
~Larry Levis, from “Some Notes on the Gazer Within,” The Gazer Within

People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos, is because things are being loved and people are being used.

John Green

quoth the madman

All romantics meet the same fate some day.
Drunk and cynical and boring someone in some dark cafe.

Joni Mitchell

quoth the madman

everything comes and goes; pleasure moves on too early and trouble leaves too slow

Joni Mitchell

quoth the madman

Those who feel they belong nowhere may find with time that they belong everywhere.

Michael Boiano

ars poetica

If it’s darkness
we’re having, let it be
extravagant.

Jane Kenyon, “Taking Down the Tree,”

quoth the madman

There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.

Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion

quoth the madman

You must remember this. It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof I was alive. Memory.

Abraham Verghese

quoth the madman

The time you have left is a lifetime in itself. Use it well.

Michael Boiano

quoth the madman

A society whose members are helpless need idols.

Erich Fromm

quoth the madman

Even places that have been shrouded in darkness for billions of years can be illuminated.
Even a stone from the bottom of a river can be used to produce fire.
Our present sufferings, no matter how dark, have certainly not continued for billions of years – nor will they longer forever.
The sun will definitely rise.
In fact, its ascent has already begun.

Daisaku Ikeda

quoth the madman

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

Albert Einstein

quoth the madman

The future is already here –it is just unevenly distributed.

William Gibson