literacki

Could we remain quiet on earth
and bear it, the war we make inside
what is—it’s a long time to be here, to be still,
to feel the rot inside now—bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars
at the edge of a field where we are once again
taken from ourselves.

— Joanna Klink, from “What Is (War)”

ponder

A prophet is the one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs. You’ll ask me why. It’s because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.

— Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ

 

ponder

“It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

pondering

 

“Better to find one thing to live for than a thousand things to be against.”
― Marty Rubin

ponderous

 

“Happiness is a fortress.”
― Fuminori Nakamura, Evil and the Mask

ponder

 

“Atheism, true 'existential' atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God.… Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ.”
― Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

literacki

 

“If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

ponder

 

“Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature.”
― Cornel West

ponder

“Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

literacki

 

“Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

literacki

 

“I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

ponder

"I love with such ferocity that it kills me when the object of my love shows by a phrase that he can escape. He escapes, and I am left clutching at a string that slips in and out among the leaves on the tree-tops. I do not understand phrases."

- Virginia Woolf, from The Waves

ponder

"Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom.
The first is being a bore."

- Jean Baudrillard

ars poetica

"I cannot survive your eyes
when they are scarred with a need
for some lesser form of love."

- Jack Kerouac, from Collected Poems

pondering

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices…"

- William James

pondering

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."

- Lao Tzu

literacki

“Some secrets are safer kept hidden. Some secrets are too dangerous to share, even with those you love and trust.”

—   George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

ponder

“There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”

—   Simone de Beauvoir, “A Very Easy Death”

pondering

"Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way."

- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

ponder

“I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain.”

—   Catherine Breillat

ponder

"If you’re not haunted
by something, as by a
dream, a vision, or
a memory, which are
involuntary, you’re not
interested or even involved."

- Jack Kerouac, from Book Of Sketches

ponder

"I like my women tragic,
silent, & ravenous souled."

- Jack Kerouac, from Book Of Sketches

ponder

"My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing."

- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book Of Hours

quoth the madman

"I don’t object to opening the heart, but I do object to finding it empty."

- Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry

ars poetica

"The flesh gets numb,
but the soul doesn’t."

- Jack Kerouac, from Book Of Sketches

ars poetica

"The trouble with me is that
outside my mind it seems
the world hasn’t got no
ass."

- Jack Kerouac, from Book Of Sketches

ponder

Meanwhile in my head, I'm undergoing open-heart surgery
- Anne Sexton

ponder

"‘I suppose,’ he said to himself, ‘I have lived too intensely, I seem to have had the stars and moon and everything else for guests, and now they’ve gone my house is weak.’ ‘Surely,’ he told himself, ‘I have drunk life too hot, and it has hurt my cup. My soul seems to leak out — I am half here, half gone away. That’s why I understand the trees and the night so painfully.’ ‘I suppose,’ he said to himself for the last time, ‘I suppose living too intensely kills you, more or less.’"

- D.H. Lawrence, from The Complete Works

ars poetica

"kisses & long afternoons
of gossip in the kitchen
as the sun gets red —"

- Jack Kerouac, from Book Of Sketches

ponder

"You make me feel — as if I were loose, and a long way off from myself…"

- D.H. Lawrence, from The Complete Works

literacki

To hope is to contradict the future.

— Emil Cioran, All Gall Is Divided

 

ponder

I am mad, and I embrace it.

— A.G. Howard

 

ars poetica

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

— Jane Kenyon, from “Taking Down the Tree,”

ars poetica

Isn’t it time to collect all those words together
words left idle like the leaves of your life?

— Muhammad Habiby, “Traces Remaining,”

the play's the thing

But love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit.

— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act II Scene vi

 

ponder

"Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.
Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant."

— Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

ponder

"This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness – he must come one day.–"
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, 24

ponder

"Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. The latter may hurt his vanity, but the former his heart, his sympathy, which always says: ‘Alas, why do you want to have as hard a time as I did?’"
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 290

ponder

"More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today; his enemy was ever the ideal of today.
So far all these extraordinary furtherers of man whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time."

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 212

ponder

“Tomorrow they will be wrong, today they are absolutely right; the age is always wrong when it is dead, always right when it is alive.
Condemn it later on, if you like; but first it had its passionate way of loving itself and lacerating itself, against which future judgements are of no avail.
It had its taste which it tasted alone and which is as incomparable, as irremediable, as the taste of wine in our mouths.“
Writing for One’s Age, What is Literature? And Other Essays, Jean-Paul Sartre

ponder

"Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a way of embracing happiness as if they wanted to crush and suffocate it, from jealousy: alas, they know only too well that it will flee."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 279

literacki

“It’s amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.”
Robert Cormier, Heroes

ponder

 

“Disappointments in love, even betrayals and losses, serve the soul at the very moment they seem in life to be tragedies. The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

pondering

“I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.”
― Blaise Pascal

ponder

 

“Only yesterday I was no different than them, yet I was saved. I am explaining to you the way of life of a people who say every sort of wicked thing about me because I sacrificed their friendship to gain my own soul. I left the dark paths of their duplicity and turned my eyes toward the light where there is salvation, truth, and justice. They have exiled me now from their society, yet I am content. Mankind only exiles the one whose large spirit rebels against injustice and tyranny. He who does not prefer exile to servility is not free in the true and necessary sense of freedom.”
― Kahlil Gibran

ars poetica

“Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names.

It was love lashed by its own self that spoke.

It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.”

― Kahlil Gibran, The Forerunner: His Parables and Poems