quoth the madman

Whatever you desire is already connected in some way to who you are and what you now have. Find that way, follow the connection.

Ralph Marston

quoth the madman

It is not the ferocity of the beast of prey that requires a moral disguise but the herd animal with its profound mediocrity, timidity and boredom with itself.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science 352

literacki

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

literacki

"What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have."

— Theodore Roethke, “In A Dark Time”


literacki

"I could list the parts of the body as in a blason. And how they can get hurt."

— Rosmarie Waldrop, from “By the Waters of Babylon”

quoth the madman

"We know that our dreams are not realizable; but it is useful to have dreams in order to see them come to naught and to learn by their failure."

— Marcel Proust

literacki

"In this book I leave inscribed the image of my dead design:
I was, like the grasses, and never uprooted."

— Fernando Pessoa, from “Written in a Book Abandoned on the Trip,” c. 1928

ars poetica

"Too much longing:
it separates us
like scent from bread,
rust from iron."

— Jane Hirshfield, from “Sentencings” 

quoth the madman

"Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today."

— Mark Twain, Autobiography

ars poetica

"Don’t try to fool the fist that’s tightening right beneath your heart."
— Ted Berrigan, from “Thin Breast Doom” in Collected Poems

the play's the thing

"I cannot weep, for all my body’s moisture

Scarce serves to quench my furnace-burning heart;

Nor can my tongue unload my heart’s great burden,

For selfsame wind that I should speak withal

Is kindling coals that fires all my breast,

And burns me up with flames that tears would quench.

To weep is to make less the depth of grief…"

— Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3

quoth the madman

"We have a sane part of our minds and an insane part. We negotiate between those two parts."

— Haruki Murakami

literacki

"I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat."

— Jorge Luis Borges, from “Two English Poems”

literacki

"My confession is acknowledged between the palms of my hands."

— Péter Nádas, Love

literacki

And the rest is rust and stardust.

~Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

quoth the madman

There are moments of such pure, sublime, unparalleled perfection that they will force you to close your eyes and hold on to them as best you can. Life is a series of these moments. Everything else is just waiting for them.

~Iain Thomas

literacki

There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

quoth the madman

I cannot tell if what the world considers ‘happiness’ is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness.

~Chuang Tzu

quoth the madman

I want to live each day for itself like a string of colored beads, and not kill the present by cutting it up in cruel little snippets to fit some desperate architectural draft for a taj mahal in the future.

~Sylvia Plath

quoth the madman

It’s never too late to be who you might have been.

~George Eliot

ars poetica

 "Even as you lean over this page,
late and alone, it shines: even now
in the moment before it disappears."

— Mark Strand, from “The Garden”

ars poetica

"And I’m blinking off old eyelids
for a new way of seeing
By the rock I rub against
I’m going to be tender again"

— Harryette Mullen, from “Shedding Skin”

ars poetica

"And a mirror gives the moon back to the moon
Home is an epilogue:
Which came first
Memory or words?"

— Fady Joudah, from “Moon Grass Rain”

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”