Eric > Eric's Quotes

“And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger. - Dreamtigers”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited

“Stability,” insisted the Controller, “stability. The primal and the ultimate need. Stability. Hence all this.”
― Aldous Huxley

“She didn’t watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed.”
― Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

“As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.”
― Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

“If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.”
― Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

“Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.”
― Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

“Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.”
― Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

“Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -> Encyclopedias are impossible -> I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) -> “I don’t know,” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional . . . .”
― Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978

“Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Me thinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers

“The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers

“Everything is octopusied.”
― Wendy Williams, Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid

“How many color patterns can your severed arm produce in one second?”
― Wendy Williams, Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid

“Winter, then spring, summer, and soon autumn. All seasons are one, ice-cold, featureless, a hell of dreariness.”
― Daniel Arsand, Lovers

“And the wind falls silent, and the birds fall silent, and the wild cherry trees no longer shiver and creek.”
― Daniel Arsand, Lovers

“It is the end of a fine bronze-tinted afternoon with purple shadows and febrile scraps of cloud.”
― Daniel Arsand

“Le cose che si sono viste una volta non possono morire, semplicemente non possono. Da qualche parte, nelle celle gocciolanti di cera di un alveare o nelle trentamile lenticole che ornano la testa di una falena, tutti i colori e le cose viste in un dato anno dovevano potersi ritrovare”
― Ray Bradbury

“The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times in a sudden recrudescence of glare.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself