Ideas are living creatures, active and activating, like flowers.
The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence.
I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection, the still, unshakeable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic, I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore.
Man will change nothing of his final destiny, which is to return sooner or later to the unconscious and the formless.
I had just made the realization that life is indestructible and that there is no such thing as time, only the present.
But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn’t Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there’s a roof to your being.
No, we are never alone. But one has to live apart to know it for the truth.
Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is – the afflictions of Job.
He falls on her lap and lies there quivering like a toothache.
It’s like saying to a drowning man: What a pity, what a pity! If you had only let me teach you how to swim! Everybody wants to right the world, nobody wants help his neighbor. They want to make a man of you without taking your body into consideration. It’s all cockeyed.
And, though reading may not at first blush seem like an act of creation, in a deep sense it is. Without the enthusiastic reader, who is really the author’s counterpart and very often his most secret rival, a book would die.
She wanted them to argue with her, to gush, to rhapsodize. She wanted them to sparkle, not to chew. Words... words... words... She gobbled them up, spewed them out again, added them up, juggled them, nursed them along, carried them to bed and put them under the pillow like soiled pajamas, slept on them, snored over them. Words... When every other memory of her had fled there would remain-HER WORDS.
She felt that in everything, sublime or ignoble, there was hidden a turbulent, a vital force, a significance and beauty which art, however glorious, was but a pale refection. “I want to live!” she muttered wildly. “I want to live!
Tell me what it is that man can build, to protect himself, which other men cannot destroy? What are we trying to defend? Only what is old, useless, dead, indefensible. Every defense is a provocation to assault. Why not surrender? Why not give – give all? It’s so damned practical, so thoroughly effective and disarming.
There were lots of words which had fallen out of my vocabulary, living abroad so long.
There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
No man ever puts down what he intended to say... words... are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.
Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.
Often she would lock herself in her room and sitting before the mirror, apply the makeup of John Barrymore, Barrymore of The Sea Beast or of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Seeing these gruesome images in the mirror she would being to rave. “Who am I?” she would say. “What am I?
It’s terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness.