‘He who shuns contact with the day, whether for fear of his fellow men or for the sake of inward composure is unwilling to eat and disdains his breakfast. He thus avoids a rupture between the nocturnal and daytime worlds – a precaution justified only by the combustion of dream in a concentrated morning’s work.’
- Walter Benjamin
“The later dreams were all of words.
I did not know that words betray
But let the poems come, and lost
That grip on things the worldly prize.
I would not suffer that again”
- Nissim Ezekiel, “Background, Casually”.
“Most adults assume that the feelings of adolescence don’t count, somehow, those searing passions of rage and hate and embarassment and horror and hopeless, abject love are something you grow out of…: there are sharp edges on everything and all of them cut. Some drugs can recreate that intensity of feeling but adulthood blunts the edges, dims the colours and taints everything with reason, rationalization or fear”
- Joanne Harris, “Gentlemen and Players”.
“I can’t think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened and enervated”
- Sylvia Plath.
“Life has a practice of living you if you don’t live it”
- Philip Larkin.
“Life is loneliness despite all the opiates, despite the false grinning faces we all wear…the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering”
- Sylvia Plath.
“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is losed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned”
- William Butler Yeats.
“Upon an ordinary material thing we can look with reverence, wondering simply at its being. But when we look upon a human face, we interpret it by what we are ourselves. And what are we?”
- Iris Murdoch, “The Sandcastle”.
“No, they whisper. You own nothing
You were a visitor, time after time
Climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way around. “
- Margaret Atwood, “The Moment”.
“Still, when I unwrap the odd anonymous note
I let myself believe that it’s from you.”
- Michael Donaghy, “Liverpool”
“And everything I know just fades away
And every time you go it hurts me so
I don’t know why when I know we’re free
Free to fly
And everything I know just fades away
And where the wildflower grows it picks its space
And that’s the way it is when nature plays its lovely hand
We’ll understand everything”
- ‘Wildflower’ [Sheryl Crow]
“Some women are like that. Most loves are like that from what I can see. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independance. After while, you start throwing people out – your friends, everyone you used to know. And it’s still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take you down with it”
- Gregory David Roberts “Shantaram”
I love them all , i have goosebumps now .
Very nice. One of my favourites is from Swinburne, “Night, the shadow of light/ Life, the shadow of death.”