Luan > Luan's Quotes

“Robert wondered if any of Harvard's revered Egyptologists had ever knocked on the door of a pyramid and expected an answer.”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

“Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival

“It was nothing of this earth but a piece of the great outside”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“and in this fascination, there was curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“I did not like the way he looked at healthy living bodies”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

“Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no “correct” interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time.

“Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“Girls have always been told that their value is tied to their appearance; their accomplishments are always magnified if they're pretty and diminished if they're not. Even worse, some girls get the message that they can get through life relying on just their looks, and then they never develop their minds. [...]

Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even what you work at it, you're working at being passive.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet nonphonological mode always intrigued me. I had a friend born of deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one’s thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice. With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: my thoughts were becoming graphically coded. There were trance-like moments during the day when my thoughts weren’t expressed with my internal voice; instead, I saw semagrams with my mind’s eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane. As”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“Well if you already know how the story goes, why do you need me to read it to you?"

" 'Cause I wanna hear it!”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“True beauty is what you see with the eyes of love,”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.’ ”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And
laugh--but smile no more.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2

“Now, when storms of Fate o'ercast Darkly my present and my past, let my future radiant shine with sweet hopes of thee and thine”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe Volume 1: Poems 1824-1829

“But sleep tha pondereth and is not to be and there oh may my weary spirit dwell apart forms heaven's eternity and yet how far from hell.

other friends have flown before on the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before the bird said nevermore.

leave my loneliness unbroken.

how dark a woe yet how sublimes a hope.

And the fever called living is conquered at last.

I stand amid the roar of a surf tormented shore and i hold within my hand grains of the golden sand how few yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep while i weep while i weep o god can i not grasp them with a tighter clasp o god can i not save one from the pitiless wave is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream.

Hell rising form a thousand thrones shall do it reverence.

It was the dead who groaned within

lest the dead who is forsaken may not be happy now.

even for thy woes i love thee even for thy woes thy beauty and thy woes

think of all that is airy and fairy like and all that is hideous and unwieldy.

hast thou not dragged Diana from her car.

I care not though it perishes with a thought i then did cherish.

For on its wing was dark alley and as it fluttered fell an essence powerful to destroy a soul that knew it well. (Talking about death)

the intense reply of hers to our intelligence.

Then all motion of whatever nature creates

most writers poets in especial prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy an ecstatic intuition and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought at the true purposes seized only at the last moment at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable at the cautions selection and rejections at the painful erasures and interpolations in a word at the wheels and pinions the tackle for scene shifting the steep ladders and demon traps the cock[s feathers a the red pain and the black patches which in ninety nine cases out of the hundred constitute the properties of the literary _histiro.

Wit the Arabians there is a medium between heaven and hell where men suffer no punishment but yet do not attain that tranquil and even happiness which they supposed to be characteristic of heavenly enjoyment.

If i could dwell where israfel hath dwelt and he where i he might not sing so wildly well mortal melody, while a bolder note than this might swell form my lyre within the sky.

And i am drunk with love of the dead who is my bride.

And so being young and dipt in folly , I feel in love with melancholy.

I could not love except where death was mingling his with beauty's breath or hymen, Time, and destiny were stalking between her and me.

Yet that terror was not friegt but a tremulous delight a feeling not the jeweled mine could teach or bribe me to define nor love although the love were thine.

Whose solitary soul could make an Eden of that dim lake.

that my young life were a lasting dream my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the morrow.

An idle longing night and day to dream my very life away.

As others saw i could not bring my passions from a comman spring from the sam source i have not taken my sorrow and all i loved i loved alone

La solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude estune belle chose

impulse upon the ether

the source of all motion is thought and the source of all thought.

Be of heart and fear nothing your allotted days of stupor have expired and tomorrow i will myself induct you into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence.

unknown now known of the speculative future merged in the august and certain present.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works Of Edgar Allen Poe: Miscellany

“And thus when by poetyr or wehn by music the most entrancing of the poetic moods we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then not as the abbate gravina supposes through excess of pleasure but through a certain petulatn impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp no wholly here on earth at once and forever these divein and rapturous joys of which through the poem or through the music we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.

The struggle to apprehend the supernal loveliness this struggle on the part of souls fittingly constituted has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as peotic

whose distant footsteps echo down the corridors of time

The impression left is one of pleasurable sadness.

This certain taint of sadness is insperably connected with al the higher manifestations of true beauty . It is nevertheless.

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.

The next desideratum was a pretext for the continous use of the one word nevermore.in observing the difficutly which i at once found in inventing a suffiecienly plausible reason for its continuous repetition i did not fail to preceive thta this difficutly arose solely form the pre assumption that the world was to be so continuously or monotonously spoke by a human being i did not fail to perceive in shor t that the difficulty lay in the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part of the creature repeating the word here then immediately arose the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable of speech and very naturally a parrot in the first instance suggested itself but was superseded forthwith by a raven as equally capable of speech and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone.“I had now gone so far as the conception of a
Raven, the bird of ill-omen, monotonously repeating the one word
"Nevermore" at the conclusion of each stanza in a poem of
melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never
losing sight of the object _supremeness_ or perfection at all
points, I asked myself--"Of all melancholy topics what, according
to the _universal_ understanding of mankind, is the _most_
melancholy?" Death, was the obvious reply. "And when," I said, "is
this most melancholy of topics most poetical?" From what I have
already explained at some length, the answer here also is
obvious--"When it most closely allies itself to _Beauty_; the
death, then, of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most
poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that
the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved
lover.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2

“Here in this body are the sacred rivers here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimages places. I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body.”
― Julia Camron

“Fame is really a shortcut for self-approval.

Enthusiasm from the Greek filled with God.

I have learned that the key to Carier resiliency is self -empowerment and choice.

A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places. said Paul Gardner. A book is never finished but at a certain point you stop writing it and gone on to the next thing. A film is never cut perfectly, but at a certain point you let go and call it done. That is a normal part of creativity letting go We always done the best that we can by the light we have to see by.

Reading Deprivation.

All the art we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

All that can be done with abusive criticism is to heal from it.

Pain had become somethign more valuable expierence.

pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention

But what is healed finally is the pain that underlines all pain the pain that we are all as Rilke phrases it 'unutterably alone.

In a sense as we are creative beings our lives become our work of art.”
― Julia Camron

“I believe that we shocked each other by how swiftly we went from being the people who knew each other best in the world to being a pair of the most mutually incomprehensible strangers who ever lived.

But it was vital to my survival to have a one bedroom of my own i saw the aprtment almost as a sanatorium a hospice clinci for my own recovery I painted the walls in the warmest colors i could find and bought myself flowers every week as if i were visiting myself in the hospital

is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty

why are you studying Italian so that just in case Italy ever invades Ethiopia again and is actually successful this time?

ciao comes from if you must know it's an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval venetians as an intimate salutation Sono il Suo Schiavo meaning i am your slave.

om Naamah Shivaya meaning I honor the divinity that resides whin me.

I wanted to experience both , I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence the dual glories of a human life I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos the singular balance of the good and he beautiful I'd been missing both during these last hard years because both pleasure and devotion require a stress free space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety , As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion.

four feet on the ground a head full of foliage looking at the world through the heart.

it was more than I wanted to toughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well.

same guatemalan musicians are always playing id rather be a sparrow than a snail on their bamboo windpipes

oh how i want italian to open itself up to me

i havent felt so starved for comprehension since then

dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontanana
dolce sitl nuovo

Dante wrote his divine comedy in terza rima triple rhyme a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating here times every five lines.
lamor che move il sole e laltre stelle

we are the masters of bel far niente

larte darrangiarsi

The reply in italy to you deserve a break today would probably be yeah no duh that's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon to go over to your house and sleep with your wife,

I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch i peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn't need to be cooked at all,)I put some olives on the plate too and the four knobs of goat cheese I'd picked up yesterday from the fromagerie down the street tend two slices of pink oily salmon for dessert a lovely peach which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm form the roman sunlight for the longest time I couldn't even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing finally when i had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal i went and sat in apatch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bit of it with my fingers while reading my daily newspaper article in Italian happiness inhabited my every molecule.

I am inspired by the regal self assurance of this town so grounded and rounded so amused and monumental knowing that she is held securely in the palm of history i would like to be like rome when i am an old lady.

I linger over my food and wine for many hours because nobody in”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I look at the augusteum and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic after all it is merely this world that is chaotic b ringing changes to us all threat nobody could have anticipated. The augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who i am what i represent whom i belong to or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday i might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough but tomorrow i could be a firework's depository, even in the eternal city says the silent augusteum . one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.


pizzaeria da michele

Passato remoto

In her world the roman forum is not remote nor is it past. It is exactly as present and close to her as i am.

The bhagavata Gita that ancient Indian yogic test says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now i have started living my own life, perfected clumsy as it may look it is resembling me now thoroughly.

It was in a bathtub back in new York reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary that i first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits, and I was so unrecognizable to myself that i probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup. But i felt a glimmer of happiness when i started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grip onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face first out of the dirt this is not selfishness but obligation you were given life it is your duty and also your entitlement as a human being to find somehtign beautiful within life no mattter how slight

But i do know that i have collected me of late through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures into somebody much more intact .

I have e put on weight I exist more now than i did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when i arrived here. And i will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person the magnification of one life is indeed an act of worth in this world, Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody s but my own .

Hatha yoga one limb of the philosophy the ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation,

Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation through scholarly study.

The yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition which i[m going to very simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.

Taoists call it imbalance Buddhism calls it ignorance Islam blames our misery on rebellion against god and the jedio Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin, Graduands say that unhappiness is that inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization needs and my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it desire is the design flaw the yogis however say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity we're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals alone with our fears and flaws an d resentment sand mortality we wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature, We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character we don't realize that somewhere within us all there does exist a supreme self is our true identity universal and divine .

you bear God within your poor wretch and know it not.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek instead a place of eternal presence form which may regard yourself and your surrounding with poise.

it's all god in disguise but they yogis believe a human life is a very special opportunity because only in alumni from and only with a special opportunity because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God realization ever occur.

is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.

a great yogi is anyone who has achieved the permanent state of enlightened bliss. A guru is a great yogi who can actually pass that state on to theirs.

mantravirya the potency of the Enlighted consciousness

capable of conscious inquiry
a yearning to understand the nature of the universe.
living spiritual master

when I was nine, I couldn't do a thing with it except cry later over these years my hypersensitive awareness of times s led me to push myself to experience life at a maximum pace if I were going to have such a short visit on earth, I had to do everything possible e to experience it now hence all the traveling all the romances all the ambition all the pasta.

On the other the Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water only in still Ater so something was telling me it would be spiritually negligent to run off now then so much was happening right here in this small, cloistered place where every minute of the day is organized to facilitate self-exploration and devotional practice.
vipassana mediation teaches that grief and nuisance are inevitable in this life but if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough you will in time experience the truth that everything. (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.
Man is neither entirely ap upper off the god and is not entirely the captain of his own destiny he is a little of both.

But when they do show up again i can just send them back here back to this rooftop of memory back to the care of those two cool blue souls who already and always understand everything
This is what rituals are for we do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place of our most complicated feeling of joy or trauma so that we don't have to have those feelings around with us forever weight us down.

we have hands we can stand on them if we want to that's our privilege that is the joy of a moral body and that is because God needs us because God loves to feel things through our hands.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“And who is the one who is always standing outside the mind's activity observing its thoughts its simply God say the yogis and if you can move into that state of witness consciousness then you can be present with God all the time?

one instant you're just a regular joe schlepping through your mundane life and then suddenly what is this nothing has changed yet you feel starred by grace swollen with wonder overflowing with bliss everting for no reason whatsoever is perfect.

all know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.

so, this is God I though congratulations to meet you.

imagine cramming yourself into such a puny box of identity when you could experience your infinitude instead.

you may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.

Antevasin it means one who lives the border.

Gloria Steinem once advised women that they should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry. What I've only recently realized is that I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father too and this is why I sent myself to bed that night alone because it was too soon from me to be receiving a gentleman suitor.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“He was thinking about what a secretive, independent-minded person Marianne was, that she could come over to his house and let him have sex with her, and she felt no need to tell anyone about it. She just let things happen, like nothing meant anything to her.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Connell whished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“He's not sure what friends are allowed to enjoy about eachother.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“These fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless gayety of people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues you can find it almost anywhere else, in Morocco, in Latin America entire in Dakar, In Kurd land.”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler

“Knights grow bold growing old; young knights dream.”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler

“And I saw how everybody dies and nobody's going to care, I felt how awful it is to live just so you can die like a bull trapped in a screaming human ring,”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler

“They understand death, they stand there in the church under the skies that have a beginning past and go into the never-ending future, waiting themselves for death, at the foot of the dead in a holy temple. I get a vision of myself and the two little boys hung up in a great endless universe with nothing overhead and nothing under but the infinite nothingness, the enormousness of it the dead without number in all directions of existence whether inward into the atom worlds of your own body or outward to the universe which may only be one atom in an infinity of atom worlds and each atom world only a figure of speech inward outward up and down nothing but emptiness and divine majesty and silence for the two little boys and me”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler