ৡ⃪evie > ৡ⃪evie's Quotes

“When does real love begin?

At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity.

At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?

At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession.”
― Anaïs Nin, Fire: From A Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.”
― David Lynch

“Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. “English,” writes Virginia Woolf, “which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache.” … Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.”
― Elaine Scarry

“The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.”
― Charles Simic

“If the photographers are soul-thieves, whose soul is being stolen in a photograph of the night sky? The soul of the last one to go to bed and the soul of the first one to rise in the morning, perhaps? Photography is a black art like alchemy. It turns matter into spirit and spirit into matter. Still, there are moments when looking at a photograph of a night sky we have a hunch what the word soul means, what the word infinity encompasses.”
― Charles Simic, The Life of Images: Selected Prose – Essays on Philosophy, Art, and Politics from an Immigrant Poet's Outsider Perspective

“I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.”
― David Lynch

“I remember,” someone said, “how in ancient times one could turn a wolf into a human and then lecture it to one's heart's content.”
― Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”
― Ezra Pound

“If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.”
― Charles Simic

“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anais Nin

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s. ”
― Anaïs Nin

“Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
― Blaise Pascal

“I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Silence is the only language god speaks.”
― Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy

“Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. Who needed a shrink of a guru when everyone we met asked us who we were the moment we opned our mouths and they heard the accent?

The truth is, we had no simple answers. Being rattled around in freight trains, open trucks, and ratty ocean-liners, we ended up being a puzzle even to ourselves. At first, that was hard to take; then we got used to the idea. We began to savor it, to enjoy it. Being nobody struck me personally as being far more interesting than being somebody. The streets were full of these "somebodys" putting on confident airs. Half the time I envied them; half the time I looked down on them with pity. I knew something they didn't, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate too.”
― Charles Simic, Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”
― Blaise Pascal

“The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art.”
― Charles Simic

“Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“The purpose of poetry is to return that which is familiar to its original strangeness.”
― Charles Simic

“Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.”
― Emily Dickinson

“They say that God is everywhere and yet we always think of him as somewhat of a recluse.”
― Emily Dickinson

“There was a movie theater here once. It played silent films. It was like watching the world through dark glasses on a rainy evening.

One night the piano player mysteriously disappeared. We were left with the storming sea that made no sound, and a beautiful woman on a long, empty bench whose tears rolled down silently as she watched me falling asleep in my mother's arms.”
― Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy:The Art of Joseph Cornell

“I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.”
― David Lynch

“A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.”
― Emily Dickinson

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées