literacki

"Even celestial signs can be deceiving.
For just a little while, though, let’s allow
Ourselves to trust the image. This is enough."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus

ars poetica

"That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove."

— Emily Dickinson, “[112]”

quoth the madman

Nothing is so common as the wish to be remarkable.

~William Shakespeare

quoth the madman

"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened."

— Jorge Luis Borges

literacki

"Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would be another form of madness."

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1662

literacki

"A torrid sun moves stiffly in my head like a magic lantern slide. A fragment of blue sky follows; after a few jolts it becomes motionless. I am all golden within."

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

literacki

"Subversive, the page where words believe they will find a foothold; subversive, the word where the page opens onto its whiteness."

— Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion

literacki

…to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because life is giving, not getting.
~Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream (Preface)

literacki

 

In a moment we’ll pass across the world’s threshold

into a region—name it as you please:
wilderness, death, disavowal of language,
or maybe simpler: the silence of love…

Vladimir Nabokov, The Poets

quoth the madman

Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It’s all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.

~Chuck Palahniuk

literacki



How wonderful it is, to be silent with someone.

Kurt Tucholsky, from Schloss Gripsholm/Castle Gripsholm

quoth the great beast

Since all things are God, in all things thou seest just so much of God as thy capacity affordeth thee.

Crowley, The Vision & The Voice

ars poetica

I know what my heart is like

Since your love died:

It is like a hollow ledge

Holding a little pool

Left there by the tide,

A little tepid pool,

Drying inward from the edge.      

~Ebb Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

ars poetica

O beauty, passing beauty! Sweetest sweet!
How can thou let me waste my youth in sighs?
I only ask to sit beside thy feet.
Thou knowest I dare not look into thine eyes.
Might I but kiss thy hand! I dare not fold
My arms about thee--scarcely dare to speak.
And nothing seems to me so wild and bold,
As with one kiss to touch thy blessed cheek.
Methinks if I should kiss thee, no control
Within the thrilling brain could keep afloat
The subtle spirit. Even while I spoke,
The bare word "kiss" hath made my inner soul
To tremble like a lute string, ere the note
Hath melted in the silence that it broke.      

~Beauty by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

literacki

"Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten."

— Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal, 1949

ars poetica

"How to sustain the miracle
Of being, that like a muted bell,
Or like some ocean-breathing shell,
Quivers, intense and still?"

— Babette Deutsch, from “Quandary”

quoth the madman

"open your thighs to fate"

~  e. e. cummings

literacki

"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral."

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras

the play's the thing

"We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all."

— Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, sc. ii.

literacki

"Par l’art seulement, nous pouvons sortir de nous, savoir ce que voit un autre de cet univers qui n’est pas le même que le nôtre et dont les paysages nous seraient restés aussi inconnus que ceux qu’il peut y avoir dans la lune. Grâce à l’art, au lieu de voir un seul monde, le nôtre, nous le voyons se multiplier et autant qu’il y a d’artistes originaux, autant nous avons de mondes à notre disposition, plus différents les uns des autres que ceux qui roulent dans l’infini, et bien des siècles après qu’est éteint le foyer dont il émanait, qu’il s’appelât Rembrandt ou Ver Meer, nous envoient encore leur rayon spécial."

— Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé

quoth the madman

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you b...egan a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.”
― Michel FoucaultSee More

ars poetica

I forgive your hand, right now rising, falling, and leaving trace
unlike what it praises; I forgive your shadow for never becoming
a stain to mark this road, this bed, but mostly this sea."— Valzhyna Mort, from “Island”

ars poetica

"Towards the end of the season
it is not bad
to have the body. To have experienced joy
as the mere lifting of hunger
is not to have known it
less."

— Jorie Graham, from “Over and Over Stitch”

literacki

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

literacki

"Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon."

— Joseph Conrad, from “A Familiar Preface” to A Personal Record

literacki

 

"Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

ars poetica

"Large moon the deep orange of embers.
Also the scent.
The griefs of others—beautiful, at a distance."

— Jane Hirshfield, “Sonoma Fire”

ars poetica

"Saying you’re dying, you’re dead. You can withdraw from this orbit of mirrors."

— Dana Levin, from “Ghosts That Need Reminding”

literacki

"Is there
from an anthropological perspective
a need for love
Or merely for
yearnings easy
to disappoint"

— W. G. Sebald, from “The Sky at Night,” in Across the Land and the Water

quoth the madman

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.

Mark Twain

literacki

We’re always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense.
But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can’t help feeling that that’s what it is.

~Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

quoth the madman

When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.
~Albert Camus

quoth the madman

Sometimes I see him as just another person, and sometimes I feel the sight of him in my gut, like a deep ache.
~Veronica Roth

quoth the madman

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.

C.S. Lewis 

quoth the madman

There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains, the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch.
~Bette Davis

four

oddness