Favorite poems and quotations.

[xerx]

This was written immediately after the first world war. I think it sums up the aftermath perfectly.

Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia...these too would be beautiful names. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.

[xerx]

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

.

[Asenath]

"He listened gravely to the discussion of possible danger, but in truth, he paid little heed. Silvanoshei was young, and the young know they will live forever."

[Moonbeaux Rainfox]

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda

Emotions change colour by the way (how) they are placed.

[gone]

Antonius Block: I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to mankind has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.

Death: And yet you do not want to die?

Antonius Block: Yes, I do.

Death: What are you waiting for?

Antonius Block: I want knowledge.

Death: You want a guarantee.

Antonius Block: Call it what you like. Is it so terribly inconceivable to comprehend God with one's senses? Why does He hide in the midst of half-promises and unseen miracles? How are we to believe the faithful when we don't believe ourselves? What will happen to those of us who want to believe, but can not? What about those who neither want to nor can believe? Why can't I kill God within me? Why does He live on in me in a humiliating way - despite my wanting to evict Him from my heart? Why is He, in spite of it all, a mocking reality I can't get rid of? Do you hear me?

Death: I hear you.

Antonius Block: I want knowledge! Not faith, not assumptions, but knowledge. I want God to stretch out His hand, uncover His face and speak to me.

Death: But he remains silent.

Antonius Block: I call out to Him in the darkness. But it's as if no one was there.

Death: Perhaps there isn't anyone.

Antonius Block: Then life is a preposterous horror. No man can live faced with Death, knowing everything's nothingness.

Death: Most people think neither of death nor nothingness.

Antonius Block: But one day we will all stand at the edge of life and face darkness.

Death: Yes, that day.

[gone]

TO A SPHINX

You are like the mollusc in chilly ponds
where sunbeams never get.
She never creeps out from her shell,
her prison she cannot forget,
she can only hide
her deepest essence
and dream of exploits great
among the waterweed,
but never wholly
and undividedly
empty herself into word or deed.

With irony your speech full spills.
You try to cover
with pretended cold
life's warmth that inside dwells.
But your voice trembles,
is strangely weak,
A blush hovers
behind each pale cheek.
A sea of fire burns
in a secret place
that no one knows,
no one can trace.

You are too frail and too weak and tame
for all the discords that sever:
to wear armour you must endeavour
in life's hard-handed game.
You are like the mollusc in chilly ponds
that never creeps out of her shell,
so unattainable,
so incomprehensible,
that no one will near you, ever.

- Karin Boye (1932)

[gone]

THE MASTER

No more harsh words
about broken violins!
I once heard the Master play
on just two strings.
He stood among the trees
and played on His darling instrument,
anthem after anthem, poem after poem,
crystallized pain,
and I realized:
That violin was me!
Others would not have considered me worthy
but in His hands I was enough!

- Bo Setterlind

[SGF]

The Law for the Wolves

"NOW this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky,
And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back;
For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

Wash daily from nose tip to tail tip; drink deeply, but never too deep;
And remember the night is for hunting and forget not the day is for sleep.

The jackal may follow the tiger, but, cub, when thy whiskers are grown,
Remember the wolf is a hunter—go forth and get food of thy own.

Keep peace with the lords of the jungle, the tiger, the panther, the bear;
And trouble not Hathi the Silent, and mock not the boar in his lair.

When pack meets with pack in the jungle, and neither will go from the trail,
Lie down till the leaders have spoken; it may be fair words shall prevail.

When ye fight with a wolf of the pack ye must fight him alone and afar,
Lest others take part in the quarrel and the pack is diminished by war.

—Rudyard Kipling

[ninaus]

The yes-man in the mirror now says no,
No longer will I answer you with lies.
The light descends like snow, so when the snow-
man melts, you will know him by his eyes.

The yes-man in the mirror now says no.
Says no. No double negative of pity
Will save you now from what I know you know:
These are your eyes, the cinders of your city.

William Jay Smith, A Note on the Vanity Dresser

[Adam Strange]

From Hamlet:

PLAYER QUEEN The instances that second marriage move Are base respects of thrift, but none of love. A second time I kill my husband dead When second husband kisses me in bed.

PLAYER KING I do believe you think what now you speak, But what we do determine oft we break. Purpose is but the slave to memory, Of violent birth, but poor validity, Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree, But fall, unshaken, when they mellow be. Most necessary ’tis that we forget To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt. What to ourselves in passion we propose, The passion ending, doth the purpose lose. The violence of either grief or joy Their own enactures with themselves destroy. Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament. Grief joys, joy grieves on slender accident. This world is not for aye, nor ’tis not strange That even our loves should with our fortunes change. For ’tis a question left us yet to prove, Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love. The great man down, you mark his favorite flies. The poor advanced makes friends of enemies. And hitherto doth love on fortune tend, For who not needs shall never lack a friend, And who in want a hollow friend doth try, Directly seasons him his enemy. But, orderly to end where I begun, Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown. Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own. So think thou wilt no second husband wed, But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.

[Lolita]

Hell is empty and all the devils are here. -The Tempest, William Shakespeare

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it. -Friedrich Nietzsche

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda. -Hannah Arendt


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[Computer Loser]

[Aster]

“If you wouldn't go to someone for advice, don't take their criticism either.”

-compassionatereminders via tumblr

read it a while back, but it has stuck with me

[Aster]

“A sparrow, mating with its echo, bred a fledgling music. I was no one’s bride.


Who knows why summer broke my heart that year?”


— Melissa Green

[Adam Strange]

Deep in the heart of summer,
sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter
that hunts on a lonely hill.

- William Sharp

[Tonatiuh]

Magic will not free itself from occultism until we have strangled the last astrologer with the guts of the last spiritual master.

Pete Carroll

[Tonatiuh]

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases--beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

[Moonbeaux Rainfox]

“I hate that nothing can be done about the suffering of children, and that most of the world blocks out their suffering to cope with their own inability to help. The few who carry the burden, like social workers and teachers, become weary, burning out after only a few short years, forced to carry the weight that should be shared by a society. Children are vastly overlooked. Their importance underestimated by their size.” ― Tarryn Fisher, Marrow

[Tonatiuh]

Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man’s likeness to a god still more. But with the aim of our study in mind, we will not forget, all the same, that the human being of today is not happy with all his likeness to a god.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

[Adam Strange]

“Fighting evil by moonlight,
winning love by daylight,
never running from a real fight,
she is the one named Sailor Moon!”

- Naoko Takeuchi

[Tonatiuh]

The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority.

Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel

[ashlesha]

“Anyone can saw a woman in half. The hard part is sitting with both halves at breakfast, asking one to pass the salt and the other to lick your wounds.”
— Andrea Cohen

[ashlesha]

“What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you?”
— Rebecca Solnit

[AtopNewton]

Sometimes we may even find that fantasy can transcend truth and make things more meaningful!!

[Tonatiuh]

Sometimes we may even find that fantasy can transcend truth and make things more meaningful!!

Are you from typology central?

[AtopNewton]

Are you from typology central?

I had some of the best moments of My life there before My Bunny project got Me kicked off of the forum.

But I Love Bunny. She entangles brilliant legacies and precursors to a paradise far beyond Imaginings!!

[ashlesha]

“I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.”

― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

[FreelancePoliceman]

I painted her a gushing thing,
With years about a score;
I little thought to find they were
A least a dozen more;
My fancy gave her eyes of blue,
A curly auburn head:
I came to find the blue a green,
The auburn turned to red.

She boxed my ears this morning,
They tingled very much;
I own that I could wish her
A somewhat lighter touch;
And if you ask me how
Her charms might be improved,
I would not have them added to,
But just a few removed!

She has the bear's ethereal grace,
The bland hyaena's laugh,
The footstep of the elephant,
The neck of a giraffe;
I love her still, believe me,
Though my hear its passion hides;
"She's all my fancy painted her,"
But oh! how much besides!

Lewis Carrol, My Fancy

[xerx]

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.

— Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

[Tonatiuh]

I had some of the best moments of My life there before My Bunny project got Me kicked off of the forum.

But I Love Bunny. She entangles brilliant legacies and precursors to a paradise far beyond Imaginings!!

You're the schizo I remember. I was there for a few years. Went by "Within" back then.

[ashlesha]

“Nothing tender about it—I show the darker powers I’ve hardly shown to anyone: Feel the weight of them, I say, before putting them back, just behind my heart, where they blacken and thrive.”
— Carl Phillips, The Darker Powers

[AWellArmedCat]

"Sometimes... expensive things... are worse." -Freckle

[AtopNewton]

The knowledge of all things is possible. - Leonardo da Vinci

[ashlesha]

[ashlesha]

“THE MAGIC OF EXISTENCE IS THAT I CAN BE INSPIRED & DEPRESSED AT THE SAME TIME. THAT I CAN HAVE FAITH & ALSO QUIETLY MAKE PLANS. THAT I CAN FALL & BE FALLEN UPON IN THE SAME BREATH. THAT I CAN BE IN LOVE & FEEL COLDER THAN I HAVE EVER FELT. THAT I CAN SEE A DEER & THINK OF YOU SIMULTANEOUSLY.”
— Eleanor Eli Moss

[AtopNewton]

take risks for huge rewards since failure in a future timeframe is inevitable without trying

[ashlesha]

Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is the hole. When I desire you, a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person. […] Most people find something disturbingly lucid and true in Aristophanes’ image of lovers as people cut in half. All desire is for a part of oneself gone missing, or so it feels to the person in love.

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay.

[AtopNewton]

“Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God: for the like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God. Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God.”
― Giordano Bruno

[ashlesha]

[MissDucki]

"Innocence is beauty. Ignorance is death" -Yana Toboso