Quotes

[tajdon]

"Man are haunted by the vastness of eternity,
and so we ask ourselves:
will our actions echo across the centuries?
Will stranger hear our names, long after we're gone?
and wonder who were?
how bravely we fought, or how fiercely we loved?"
- Odysseous in Homer's The Iliad

[cremaster]

Better on your arse than on your feet,

Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot.


Beckett - trans Chamfort

[PoubelleMaBelle]

"Fuck this tilted field"

- cuss (Bulgarian)

[Faust]

For the Jew the world is a cage with wild beasts. The door is locked and he is there without whip or revolver. His courage is so great that he does not even smell the dung in the corner. The spectators applaud but he does not hear. The drama, he thinks, is going on inside the cage. The cage, he thinks, is the world. Standing there alone and helpless, the door locked, he finds that the lions do not understand his language. Not one lion has ever heard of Spinoza. Spinoza? Why they can't even get their teeth into him. "Give us meat!" they roar, while he stands there petrified, his ideas frozen, his Weltanschauung a trapeze out of reach. A single blow of the lion's paw and his cosmogony is smashed.

- Henry Miller. Tropic of Cancer.

[Faust]

"I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions. Beside the perfection of Turgenev I put the perfection of Dostoyevsky. Here, then, in one and the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in Van Gogh's letters there is a perfection beyond either of these. It is the triumph of the individual over art."

- Henry Miller. Tropic of Cancer

[Fade to Black]

I never finished Tropic of Cancer but that last line about the triumph of the individual over art in Van Gogh has always stuck with me.

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us.
Men can be analysed, women … merely adored.

- Oscar Wilde The Ideal Husband(1895)

[Faust]

/\ Today, any feminist would neuter Wild for this one.

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

^And it gets even worse ...

You think science cannot grapple with the problem of women?
Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has
no future before it, in this world. And women represent the
irrational. Well-dressed women do.

- Oscar Wilde The Ideal Husband(1895)

[Faust]

I love it.

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

Yes, there's much to love, to me probably the best play Wilde wrote.

[genevieveryoko]

"you have to change to stay the same" - de kooning

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

Infatuated with love, on awakening to find
the night almost over;
He tentatively examines the handkerchief
woven of mermaid silk.
Only when dead does the spring silkworm's
thread come to an end;
Not until burnt to ashes do the tears of
the wax candle dry up.
The male and female phoenix mates have been
blown apart by the wind;
Her soft jade and captivating fragrance are
no longer of this world.
Before he has finished boasting of the two
words that spell "romance";
The cock has crowed beneath the waning moon
and the fifth watch is chill.

- The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin Ping Mei. Volume Four: The Climax(1610)

[the-orb]

Hatred enfolds us
Inculcates the minds with its heresy
Laymen enfold us
Clemency arrives to set you free

Freedom's so hard
When we are all bound by laws
Etched in the scheme of nature's own hand
Unseen by all those who fail
In their pursuit of faith

-Dead Can Dance's "Xavier"

What's even more amazing is that these are actual song lyrics.

[Fade to Black]

"Talent is dangerous. Character is necessary." - Henry Geldzahler, from an interview with Georg Baselitz