Robert Ramirez > Robert's Quotes

“But the stars that marked our starting fall away.
We must go deeper into greater pain,
for it is not permitted that we stay.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Hope not ever to see Heaven. I have come to lead you to the
other shore; into eternal darkness; into fire and into ice.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“I am the way into the city of woe,
I am the way into eternal pain,
I am the way to go among the lost.

Justice caused my high architect to move,
Divine omnipotence created me,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.

Before me there were no created things
But those that last forever—as do I.
Abandon all hope you who enter here.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“So that the Universe felt love,
by which, as somebelieve,
the world has many times been turned to chaos.
And at that moment this ancient rock,
here and elsewhere, fell broken into pieces.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“A rapid bolt will rend the clouds apart,
and every single White be seared by wounds.
I tell you this. I want it all to hurt.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Here pity only lives when it is dead - Virgil”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“The broken branch hissed loudly, and then that
wind was converted into these words: "Briefly will
you be answered.
When the fierce soul departs from the body from
which it has uprooted itself, Minos sends it to the
seventh mouth.
It falls into the wood, and no place is assigned to
it, but where chance hurls it, there it sprouts like a
grain of spelt.
It grows into a shoot, then a woody plant; the
Harpies, feeding on its leaves, give it pain and a
window for the pain.
Like the others, we will come for our remains, but
not so that any may put them on again, for it is not
just to have what one has taken from oneself.
Here we will drag them, and through the sad
wood our corpses will hang, each on the thornbrush
of the soul that harmed it.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I shall endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso

“those cries rose from among the twisted roots
through which the spirits of the damned were slinking
to hide from us. Therefore my Master said:
'If you break off a twig, what you will learn
will drive what you are thinking from your head.'

Puzzled, I raised my hand a bit and slowly
broke off a branchlet from an enormous thorn:
and the great trunk of it cried: 'Why do you break me?'

And after blood had darkened all the bowl
of the wound, it cried again: 'Why do you tear me?
Is there no pity left in any soul?

Men we were, and now we are changed to sticks;
well might your hand have been more merciful
were we no more than souls of lice and ticks.'

As a green branch with one end all aflame
will hiss and sputter sap out of the other
as the air escapes- so from that trunk there came

words and blood together, gout by gout.
Startled, I dropped the branch that I was holding
and stood transfixed by fear,...”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
― Dante Alighieri

“A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.”
― William Blake

“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”
― William Blake

“Sometimes [...] real love is silent as well as blind.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“His name is Legion. He is the king of nowhere.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“...you'll find that God often chooses to speak through the dying and the insane...A healthy person might be apt to filter the divine message, to alter it with his or her own personality. In other words, a healthy person might make a shitty prophet.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Do not be afraid; our fate
Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Through me you go into a city of weeping; through me you go into eternal pain; through me you go amongst the lost people”
― Dante Alighieri, The Inferno

“And I — my head oppressed by horror — said:
"Master, what is it that I hear? Who are
those people so defeated by their pain?"
      And he to me: "This miserable way
is taken by the sorry souls of those
who lived without disgrace and without praise.
      They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.
      The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them —
even the wicked cannot glory in them.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Stab your demoniac smile to my brain,
Soak me in cognac, love, and cocaine”
― Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

“But who names a starship the Icarus? What kind of man possess that much hubris, that he dares it to fall?”
― Amie Kaufman, These Broken Stars

“Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?
Why, when balance has been strictly studied
And flight calculated with the best of reason
Till no aberrant element should, by rights, remain-
Why, still, should the lust for ascension
Seem, in itself, so close to madness?
Nothing is that can satify me;
Earthly novelty is too soon dulled;
I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable,
Closer and closer to the sun's effulgence.
Why do these rays of reason destroy me?
Villages below and meandering streams
Grow tolerable as our distance grows.
Why do they plead, approve, lure me
With promise that I may love the human
If only it is seen, thus, from afar-
Although the goal could never have been love,
Nor, had it been, could I ever have
Belonged to the heavens?
I have not envied the bird its freedom
Nor have I longed for the ease of Nature,
Driven by naught save this strange yearning
For the higher, and the closer, to plunge myself
Into the deep sky's blue, so contrary
To all organic joys, so far
From pleasures of superiority
But higher, and higher,
Dazzled, perhaps, by the dizzy incandescence
Of waxen wings.

Or do I then
Belong, after all, to the earth?
Why, if not so, should the earth
Show such swiftness to encompass my fall?
Granting no space to think or feel,
Why did the soft, indolent earth thus
Greet me with the shock of steel plate?
Did the soft earth thus turn to steel
Only to show me my own softness?
That Nature might bring home to me
That to fall, not to fly, is in the order of things,
More natural by far than that improbable passion?
Is the blue of the sky then a dream?
Was it devised by the earth, to which I belonged,
On account of the fleeting, white-hot intoxication
Achieved for a moment by waxen wings?
And did the heavens abet the plan to punish me?
To punish me for not believing in myself
Or for believing too much;
Too earger to know where lay my allegiance
Or vainly assuming that already I knew all;
For wanting to fly off
To the unknown
Or the known:
Both of them a single, blue speck of an idea?”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“Icarus should have waited for nightfall,
the moon would have never let him go.”
― Nina Mouawad

“He woke her then, and trembling and obedient, she ate that burning heart out of his hand. Weeping, I saw him then depart from me. Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her? Find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so. But would she see through the bars of his plight, and ache for him?”
― Dante Alighieri edited

“Now you know how much my love for you
burns deep in me
when I forget about our emptiness,
and deal with shadows as with solid things.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 2: Purgatorio

“Madness it is to hope that human minds
can ever understand the Infinite
that comprehends Three Persons in One Being.

Be satisfied with quia unexplained,
O Human race! If you knew everything,
no need for Mary to have borne a son.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 2: Purgatorio

“So heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate,
Giving to death, and dying to redeem,
So dearly to redeem what hellish hate
So easily destroy'd, and still destroys,
In those who, when they may, accept not grace.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Horror and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts and from the bottom stir
The Hell within him, for within him Hell
He brings and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more than from himself can fly
By change of place.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Even the demons are encouraged when their chief is "not lost in loss itself.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost