Ben > Ben's Quotes

“The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

“As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and whirl of doom congeals.”
― Martin Buber

“Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“an uncertain mythology
in which one hears the names
when the wind stops
of all the false gods”
― Jean Follain, Transparence of the World

“Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“My words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.”
― W.S. Merwin, The Lice: Poems

“All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities