When a portrait commences badly it’s because you’re not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you.
Kafka’s long nightmares were but a preparation for the actual horrors we were to experience even to a greater degree.
A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend.
In a world grown paralyzed with introspection and constipated by delicate mental meals this brutal exposure of the substantial body comes as a vitalizing current of blood. The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.
The book is sustained on its own axis by the pure flux and rotation of events. Just as there is no central point, so also there is no question of heroism or of struggle since there is no question of will, but only an obedience to flow.
One’s destination is never a place, rather a new way of looking at things.
Someday I am going to own a few feet of earth somewhere and put a house over it. Just one big room will do, with a stove and a basin of water, a huge desk, a bookcase and an easel. Then life can go rolling by, and what floats in through my door will be sufficient for me.
The thinking that gets you nowhere takes you everywhere.
Better keep the young on lemons and lavender until they’ve reached the age of discretion.
A writer often has two great surprises in store for him: the first is the lack of proper response to his efforts; the second is the overwhelming nature of the response when it does come. One is just as bad as the other.
I think of so many eminent men who visited these shores only to return to their native land saddened, disgusted and disillusioned. There is one thing America has to give, and that they are all in agreement about: MONEY.
Give me a few days of peace in your arms – I need it terribly. I’m ragged, worn, exhausted. After that I can face the world.
How very like Zen is this from Whitman: “Is it lucky to be born? It is just as lucky to die.” In summarizing his pages on Whitman, Bucke makes, among others, the following statements: In no man who ever lived was the sense of eternal life so absolute. Fear of death was absent. Neither in health nor in sickness did he show any sign of it, and there is every reason to believe he did not feel it. He had no sense of sin.
What we learn, of value, we get indirectly, largely unconsciously. It is too often stressed, in my opinion, that we learn through sorrow and suffering. I do not deny this to be true, but I hold that we also learn, and perhaps more lastingly, through moments of joy, of bliss, of ecstasy. Struggle has its importance, but we tend to overrate it. Harmony, serenity, bliss do not come from struggle but from surrender.
Life will continue to be a hell as long as the people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality. Switching from one ideology to another is a useless game.
What we don’t want to face, what we don’t want to hear or listen to, whether it be nonsense, treason or sacrilege, are precisely the things we must give heed to. Even the idiot may have a message for us. Maybe I am one of those idiots. But I will have my say.
Are we not all victims of fear and anxiety precisely because we lack faith and trust in one another?
Jesus made a number of explicit statements, injunctions really. All to the effect that one was to take no thought but to respond immediately to any appeal for aid. And to respond in large measure. To give your cloak as well as your coat, to walk two miles and not one. And as we know well, with these injunctions went another, more important one – to return good for evil. “Resist not evil!
Despite all the talk about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, electoral freedom, and so on, I dare say it would be a shock to know what the common man thinks about the problems which confront the world. The common man is always cleverly set off one against the other, children are always ruled out, young people are ordered to conform and obey, and the views of the wise, the saintly, the true servers of mankind, are forever scorned as impractical.
It’s hard to talk to a person when you have nothing in common with him or her, you betray yourself.
Success is a bitter fruit: sooner or later, what you have created turns against you, becomes your torment.