In the depths of a man’s being there was something that responded with a quack to such perfume. Quack!
And when I say that he lost his head, what I mean is not that his judgement abandoned him but that his enthusiasms and visions swept him far out.
In this view the body itself, with its two arms and vertical length, was compared to the Cross, on which you knew the agony of consciousness and separate being.
Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance.
The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with.
Because nobody anyhow can show what he is without a sense of exposure and shame, and can’t care while preoccupied with this but must appear better and stronger than anyone else, mad! And meantime feels no real strength in himself, cheats and gets cheated, relies on cheating but believes abnormally in the strength of the strong. All this time nothing genuine is allowed to appear and nobody knows what’s real. And that’s disfigured, degenerate, dark mankind – mere humanity. But.
I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
To know how it feels to be a seaweed you have to get in the water.
His taste in clothes was horrible, but he didn’t buy cheap things. He wore corduroy or velvet shirts from Clyde’s, painted neckties, striped socks.
So many questions impossible to answer could not be asked about an honest man. Nor perhaps about a sane man.
You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York?
No one seemed satisfied, and Wilhelm was especially horrified by the cynicism of successful people. Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone And irony, too. Maybe it couldn’t be helped.
Ljepota nije ljudski izum.
I will do no more to enact the peculiarities of life. This is done well enough without my special assistance.
Pretpostavimo da sam ja apsolutno u pravu a da monsignor, na primjer, ima potpuno krivo. Ako sam ja u pravu, problem suvislosti svijeta, i sva odgovornost za nju, postaju moji.
For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.
But I’m thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labor camps. Why does the century – I don’t know how else to put it – underwrite so much destruction? There is a lameness that comes over all of us when we consider these facts.
I brought all this on myself by telling Ramona the story of my life – how I rose from humble origins to complete disaster. But a man who has made so many mistakes can’t afford to ignore the corrections of his friends. Friends like Sandor, that humped rat. Or like Valentine, the moral megalomaniac and prophet in Israel. To all such, one is well advised to listen. Scolding is better than nothing. At least it’s company.
Rubin, the man at the newsstand, had poor eyes. They may not have been actually weak but they were poor in expression, with lacy lids that furled down at the corners.
She has two husbands. Whose are the kids? The fellow detected her and she gave a signed confession that two of the four children were not the father’s.