lisa_emily > lisa_emily's Quotes

“The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.”
― Leonora Carrington (Down Below)

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Maintenant que la glace est rompue, causons." (Now the ice is broken, let's talk.)

-After shooting into a mirror”
― Alfred Jarry

“The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.”
― Walter Benjamin

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting...”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box with the left overs.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“and only much later, when Mascha wanted a child, did I realize that love is a deadly poison, a vice, a vice that one wants to see shared, & that if one of the two involved is smitten, the other is often no more than a passive participant, or vixxtim, or possessed. And Moravagine was possessed.

Love is masochistic. These cries & complaints, these sweet alarms. this anguished state of lovers, this suspense, this latent pain that is just below the surface, almost unexpressed, these thousand & one anxieties over the loved one's absence, this feeling of time rushing by, this touchiness, these fits of temper, these long daydreams, this childish fickleness of behavior, this moral torture where vanity & self-esteem, or perhaps honor, upbringing & modesty are at stake, these highs & lows in the nervous tone, these leaps of imagination, this fetishism, this cruel precision of senses, whipping & probing, the collapse, the prostration, the abdication, the self-abasement, the perpetual loss & recovery of one's personality, these stammered words & phrases, these pet-names, this intimacy, these hesitations in physical contact, these epileptic tremors, these successive & even more frequent relapses, this more & more turbulent & stormy passion with its ravages progressing to the point of complete inhibition & annihilation of the soul, the debility of the senses, the exhaustion of the marrow, the erasure of the brain & even the desiccation of the heart, this yearning for ruin, for destruction, for mutilation, this need of effusiveness, of adoration, of mysticism, this insatiability which expresses itself in hyper-irritability of the of mucus membranes, in errant taste, in vasomotor or peripheral disorders, & which conjures up jealousy & vengeance, crimes, prevarications & treacheries, this idolatry, this incurable melancholy, this apathy, this profound moral misery, this definitive & harrowing doubt, this despair--are not all these stigmata the very symptoms of love in which we can first diagnose, then trace with a sure hand, the clinical curve of masochism?”
― Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine

“We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Extinction

“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“evening harmony

behold the times when trembling on their stems
the flowers evaporate like thuribles
the sounds and scents turn in the evening cool;
sad waltz, languid intoxication!

the flowers evaporate like thuribles
the viol quivers like a heart that's torn
sad waltz, languid intoxication!
the sky is sad like some memorial.

the viol quivers like a heart that's torn
a heart that hates the void perpetual!
the sky is sad like some memorial
the sun has drowned in it's vermillion

a heart that hates the void perpetual
recalls each glowing moment of times gone!
the sun has drowned in it's vermillion;

your memory shines my monstrance personal”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.”
― Dorothy Parker, You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker

“I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“With a face of wrinkled leather and a ropy
body jettisoned of everything but raw muscle, he was like a heavy-smoking, hard-drinking Bilbo Baggins; the tiger was his Ring.”
― Jonathan C. Slaght, Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China