literacki

“Can we only love something created by our own imagination? Are we all in fact unloving and unlovable? Then one is alone, and if one is alone then lover and beloved are equally unreal, and the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.”
— T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

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“My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole lifetime?”

 ~Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

quoth the madman

Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are gardeners.

~William Shakespeare

ponderous

Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?

~Anton Chekhov, The Complete Short Novels

quoth the madman

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

ponderous

"I am learning all the time, and my tombstone shall be my diploma."
- Eartha Kitt

ponder

"The unconscious at work in dreams employs metonymy and metaphor, and the analyzed in talking about his dreams employs virtually all of rhetoric’s figures and tropes. To the analyst, nothing is ever “just a figure of speech.” The analyst’s mode of reading attends to both what is presented and what is not presented, to both speech and writing, to both what is enunciated and what is avoided. In essence, it reads all speech as a compromise formation, as produced by competing forces."

- Bruce Fink, Lacan To The Letter, reading “the instance of the letter in the unconscious”, p. 75

quoth the mdman

"I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."
- Albert Camus

literacki

"How odd, I can have all this inside me
and to you it’s just words."

- David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

ponderous

"There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind."

C.S. Lewis

literacki

“No, he would never know his father, who would continue to sleep over there, his face for ever lost in the ashes. There was a mystery about that man, a mystery he had wanted to penetrate. But after all there was only the mystery of poverty that creates beings without names and without a past, that sends them into the vast throng of the nameless dead who made the world while they themselves were destroyed for ever. For it was just that that his father had in common with the men of the Labrador. The Mahon people of the Sahel, the Alsatians on the high plateaus, with this immense island between sand and sea, which the enormous silence was now beginning to envelop: the silence of anonymity; it enveloped blood and courage and work and instinct, it was at once cruel and compassionate. And he who had wanted to escape from the country without name, from the crowd and from a family without a name, but in whom something had gone on craving darkness and anonymity - he too was a member of the tribe, marching blindly into the night near the old doctor who was panting at his right, listening to the gusts of music coming from the square, seeing once more the hard inscrutable faces of the Arabs around the bandstands, Veillard’s laughter and his stubborn face - also seeing with a sweetness and a sorrow that wrung his heart the deathly look on his mother’s face at the time of the bombing - wandering though the night of the years in the land of oblivion where each one is the first man, where he had to bring himself up, without a father, having never known those moments when a father would call his son, after waiting for him to reach the age of listening, to tell him the family’s secret, or a sorrow of long ago, or the experience of his life, those moments when even the ridiculous and hateful Polonius all of a sudden becomes great when he is speaking to Laertes; and he was sixteen, then he was twenty, and no one had spoken to him, and he had to learn by himself, to grow alone, in fortitude, in strength, find his own morality and truth, at last to be born as a man and then to be born in a harder childbirth, which consists of being born in relation to others, to women, like all the men born in this country who, one by one, try to learn without roots and without faith, and today all of them are threatened with eternal anonymity and the loss of the only consecrated traces of their passage on this earth, the illegible slabs in the cemetery that the night has now covered over; they had to learn how to live in relation to others, to the immense host of the conquerors, now dispossessed, who had preceded them on this land and in whom they now had to recognize the brotherhood of race and destiny.”

— The First Man, Albert Camus.

quoth the madman

“If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

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"…reality is something distant that comes infinitely slowly to those who have patience." - Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters To A Young Poet

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"She is passion embodied, a flower of melodrama in eternal bloom." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Idiot