quoth the madman

Must one suffer eternally, or eternally flee from beauty? Nature, pitiless enchantress, always victorious rival, let me be! Tempt no longer my desires and my pride! The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist screams with fear before being vanquished.

Charles Baudelaire

pondering

I do not forget that my voice is but one voice, my experience a mere drop in the sea, my knowledge no greater than the visual field in a microscope.

Carl Jung

ponder

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine’s Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world’s puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.

Hermann Hesse

quoth the madman

Please stop destroying what is left of your heart by constantly thinking about things that have broken you.

Nikita Gill

ponder

One of the hardest things you will ever have to do my dear is grieve the loss of a person who is still alive.
Miz Hyacinth my grandmother

quoth the madman

I fall into melancholies of honey and roses which are none the less melancholy…
— George Sand, from letter to Gustave Flaubert, 9 May 1867

quoth the madman

 

Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it’s no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing.

Eckhart Tolle

ponder

Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.

Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

literacki

I do not want to pass the time. I want to grab hold of it and leave my mark upon the world.

Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

quoth the madman

Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.

C.S. Lewis

ponderous

Good books make you ask questions. Bad readers want everything answered.

Scott Westerfeld

quoth the madman

There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.

John Steinbeck

quoth the madman

The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame.

Salman Rushdie

ponder

Be confident. Too many days are wasted comparing ourselves to others and wishing to be something or someone we aren’t. Everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses. It’s only when you accept everything you are - and aren’t - that you will truly succeed.

quoth the madman

Gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants – but debt is the money of slaves.

Norm Franz

quoth the madman

Circumstances don’t make the man, they only reveal him to himself.

Epictetus 

ponder

Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.
First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind’s way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.
Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying ‘time heals all wounds’ is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.
Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.
Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.

Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

quoth the madman

When we’re invited to a banquet, we take whatever is served, and if anyone should ask his host to serve him with fish or cakes, he would be thought eccentric; and yet in the wider world, we ask the gods for things that they don’t give us, irrespective of the many things that they actually have given us.

Epictetus

literacki

To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it’s over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that’s rare…That’s rare and valuable.

Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories

quoth the madman

…I’ve got nature & art & poetry, & if that isn’t enough, what is?

Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

quoth the madman

Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.

William James

quoth the madman

Almost everyone has some person from the past who continues to stick in their soul like a deep splinter. You know who I’m talking about. The most obvious example is the lover who dumped you years ago for reasons you still don’t understand, or accept. The bully who tormented you in school, the teacher who inspired you and opened doors in your brain or soul that you didn’t know existed. A neighbor who suffered and died with dignity but remained kind and thoughtful right up until the end. Ironically in some cases if you were to go to these people now and tell them what a lasting effect they have had on you, they would be genuinely surprised or perplexed. Because in truth you were only a very small cloud on their horizon, a blip on their screen, or someone they forgot very quickly. But boy, you sure remember *them*.

Jonathan Carroll

quoth the madman

I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away.

~Vincent van Gogh, Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh

ponder

After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.

Oscar Wilde - Absinthe.

quoth the madman

 

“Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

literacki

 

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

quoth the madman

 

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

quoth the madman

 

“We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift.”
― Marilyn Monroe

quoth the madman

 

“But he who dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.”
― Anne Brontë

quoth the madman

“I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?”
― Jean Kerr

quoth the madman

 

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

literacki

 

“That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

ponder

 

"forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit."

–Virgil, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1-6

ponder

I am not meant for greater things.
I belong to the sea.
Dark, blue, weightless, loud, yet
quiet.
I want to go home.

ponder

 

I do not love men: I love what devours them.

~André Gide, Prometheus Illbound

ponder

 

I look at you and see all the ways a soul can bruise, and I wish I could sink my hands into your flesh and light lanterns along your spine so you know that there’s nothing but light when I see you.

literacki

You haven’t kissed anyone for a while now.
To you, everything tastes like blood.

Warsan Shire, from “Souvenir,” Our Men Do Not Belong to Us

quoth the madman

"August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time."

– Sylvia Plath

pondering

"People like you and me are quite lonely really but we still have each other, we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of desiring the unusual."

–   Hermann Hesse, Demian

ponder

There are poets who sing you to sleep
and poets who ready you for war
and I want to be both.

Ashe Vernon

quoth the madman

The human race is the most stupid and unfair kind of race.
A lot of the runners don’t even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water.
Some runners are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side.
It’s not surprising a lot of people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk and shout abuse.

What the human race needs is a lot more streakers.

 ~ Banksy

quoth the madman

"Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? ”

~John Keats

ars poetica

Have you had enough darkness yet?
No, I haven’t had enough darkness.
Have you had enough fire?
Maybe.

Enough wind and rain?
Enough black ink?
Ask me again, later.

Have you had enough sugar?
Definitely.
Enough salt? No.

I haven’t had enough salt.
Are you finished with wringing your hands?
Definitely.

Finished with spiders and silks
And creatures of glamour?
Probably not.

Winsome looks?
Completely.
Pity? Never.

I feel pity right now
For everyone who got broken,
Including me. Pity feels

Like a sore and swollen heart
Leaking blood and tears
So hot they sting.

Imagine that. Stay there.
Have you had enough wind?
No. Enough earth? No.

Enough water? No, not nearly enough.
Enough dirt to walk on?
No. Never, never.

~Irene McKinney