- Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
- "I would rather die of fire than of void."
- Peter J. Carroll
- "As sunlight obscures the stars by day, so does wakefulness obscure the fact we are still dreaming."
- Sylvia Plath, from The Collected Poems: Love Letter
- "If I’m alive now, then I was dead / Though, like a stone, unbothered by it, / Staying put according to habit."
- Clarice Lispector, from “The Princess (I),” Selected Cronicas
- "I would then stretch out my hand… Because it is night, because I am alone in another’s night, because this silence is much too great for me, because I have two hands in order to sacrifice the better of the two, and because I have no choice."
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Curiosity is insubordination in it's purest form.
- Jonathan Safran Foer
- I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. he had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him. (_Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_)
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Che mi ligasse con si dolci vinci?
- Candance Pert
- As above, so below. To think otherwise is to suffer, to experience the stresses of separation from our source, from our true union.
- Tara Ploughman
- Never offer what you'd hate someone for accepting.
- Missouri businessman on the completion of America's transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, 1869 in regards to Americans and travel
- They love to go ahead fast, and to go with power. They love to annihilate the magnificent distances.
- Jack Kerouac
- And go off somewhere and find great solitude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, to, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world.
- Walt Whitman
- This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants...have patience and diligence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or any number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in open air of every season of every year, re examine all you have been told at school at church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
- Ken Ilgunas
- Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
- The Mahabharata
- To abstain from speaking is regarded as very difficult. It is not possible to say much that is valuable and striking.
- Paul Graham
- Innocence is also open-mindedness. We want kids to be innocent so they can continue to learn. Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you're going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you're better off learning it last. Otherwise you won't bother learning much more.
- Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings. Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.
- Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon
- Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason. These fortune-cookie admonitions sound pat, but the surest way out of depression is to dislike it and not to let yourself grow accustomed to it. Block out the terrible thoughts that invade your mind.
- I Wrote This For You
- The Shop That Lets You Rent Happiness
- "This is the one." The universe assures me from behind the counter. "But I thought you said the last one was the one." I reply. "No." Says the universe. "I sold you that one so you would know that this, this is the one." "Is there another one?" I ask the universe. "I can't tell you." They reply. "It'd ruin the surprise."
- Fool Tarot, alter ego today is the "Quantum Leaper"
- The blissful frailty of unwritten conclusions and unguarded access sweetens the desire.
- The Missed Appointment
- So yes, we could kiss. I could kiss you and you could kiss me. There's no science, plane ticket or clock stopping us. But if we kiss, it will end the world. And I've ended the world before. No one survived. Least of all me.
- Edgar Allen Poe
- Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
- I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
- Ernest Hemingway
- "All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."
- Each day begins in darkness; never overvalue the light.
- Beauty without intelligence is a masterpiece painted on a napkin.
- Tycho Brahe
- Those who study the stars have God for a teacher.
feb 22 2009 ∞
oct 26 2017 +