Quotes

[gregor]

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." - john philpot curran

[Arkady]

"...The schizo knows how to leave: he has made departure into something as simple as being born or dying. But at the same time his journey is strangely stationary, in place. He does not speak of another world, he is not from another world: even when he is displacing himself in space, his is a journey in intensity, around the desiring-machine that is erected here and remains here. For here is the desert propagated by our world, and also the new earth, and the machine that hums, around which the schizos revolve, planets for a new sun. These men of desire -- or do they not yet exist? -- are like Zarathustra. They know incredible sufferings, vertigos and sicknesses. They have their specters. They must reinvent each gesture. But such a man produces himself as a free man, irresponsible, solitary, and joyous, finally able to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking permission; a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatever. He has simply ceased being afraid of becoming mad. He experiences and lives himself as the sublime sickness that will no longer affect him..."

- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

"I was violent and I was phlegmatic at the same time. I was like the lighthouse itself - secure in the midst of the most turbulent sea. Beneath me the solid rock, the same shelf of rock on which the towering skyscrapers were reared. My foundations went deep into the earth and the armature of my body was made of steel riveted with hot bolts. Above all I was an eye, a huge searchlight which scoured far and wide, which revolved ceaselessly, pitilessly. This eye so wide-awake seemed to have made all the other faculties dormant; all my powers were used up in the effort to see, to take in the drama of the world. If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man’s doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself."

- Henry Miller

Sexts from the Void @voidsexts 11 Sep
sext: ur hand sinks up to the wrist into the hot dry sand. there is no sound of waves. above u the sun is huge and red

[ADreamofBlue]

"I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”
So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot. For who can bring them to see what will happen after them?"

Ecclesiastes 3:18-22

[swami]

“Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love - now you are love.”

― Osho

[Philipppp]

Short men

"The worst is ugly short men. Women can be short, but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will not forgive in life - to be born short. I have never been friends with a short man in my life. Don't trust them; they are mean, and they want to kill you." - Karl Lagerfeld

[Faust]

“Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.” - Cicero

[MJRH]

Wait, then doesn't that mean the last half of that list is determined by the first half?

[electricgecko]

excellent thread.

"[…] The potter himself was as sharp as a sword from Sagami. Yet he enveloped the whole thing in beauty. This tea bowl looks very simple, but there's a certain haughtiness about it, something regal and arrogant, as though he didn't regard other people as being quite human."

— from Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa, which i highly recommend for anybody remotely interested in japanese aesthetics.

[Faust]

Wait, then doesn't that mean the last half of that list is determined by the first half?

Haha, well-plagued, sir. #trump2016

[MJRH]

oh dear, that turned dark fast!

Er, quotations! I just finished reading Op Oloop, by Juan Filloy. An excellent book, very wordy and baroque, at once fantastical and surreal. About a statistician whose well-ordered 1934 world disintegrates around him, slowly sending him madder and madder:

Wine: blood—blood: wine! I've seen farmers who, on raising a glass of local red, made the sign of the cross and wept, believing themselves to be drinking the blood of their children. I've seen landscapes riddled with mortar craters, where cadavers were twisted and contorted like vines. I've seen blond heads clustered like grapes, their juices watering the greedy ground before being bottled and sold as the fizz in champagne. I've seen deciduous vines rise up on limpid mornings like ghosts by the banks of the Mosel, out of burning orchards. And everywhere, wearing crowns of tendrils and barbed wire, the green flesh of youth fermenting with blight, ignominy, shadow. So wine makes me drunk on sorrow, and then oblivion. And knowing that human essence is transmuted therein, each new sip scorns my sorrow and embalms my oblivion.


...he was probing the enigma of why men fall in love with their dreams, which are then so destroyed by harsh realities that their dreamers become cuckolded by their own illusions.

[Faust]

"Under the shimmering diversions of the spectacle, banalization dominates modern society the world over and at every point where the developed consumption of commodities has seemingly multiplied the roles and objects to choose from... The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived.

Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society - unfettered, free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its byproducts magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process. In one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-star; in another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power over the lived."

- Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

[Faust]

"What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous... Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative." - Don DeLillo, Mao II

[galia]

sentences like these make my eyes roll so far back into my head I can see my own brain

[Faust]

sentences like these make my eyes roll so far back into my head I can see my own brain

Imagine how I feel. Read a book, make an effort to post something interesting, and than the post after is some brain cell killing banality.

[ADreamofBlue]

"Man is in love, and loves what vanishes. What more is there to say?" ~ W.B. Yeats