I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow.
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
Oda Jaune
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
(source unknown)
It’s only temporary: you either die, or get better. —Something we used to say about life in general, feeling sophisticated and amusing in bars, back in the days when we thought how you behaved was the fault of other people.
― Eve Babitz, Black Swans: Stories.
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
― Samuel Beckett
Larry Clark, Jonathan anthology n°61, 2005.
Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is.
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow.
虢子楷 Sheep
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.
Jules Joseph Lefebvre, The Grasshopper (detail), 1872.
If we think of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, we see them standing alone, outside of history. They are spotlighted by their intensity, and the background is all darkness. They intersect history, but are not a part of it. There is something anti-history about such men; they are not subject to time, accident and death, but their intensity is a protest against it. I have elsewhere called such men "Outsiders" because they attempt to stand outside history, which defines humanity on terms of limitation, not of possibility.
― Colin Wilson in Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs, 1964.
We are told that when Hölderlin went 'mad,' he constantly repeated, 'Nothing is happening to me, nothing is happening to me.'
― Paul Celan
Polly Chandler
Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.
― Hermann Broch
Frank Wilbert Stokes, The Phantom Ship (ca. 1903). (via ahotknife)