Blue Voyage Quotes

“Everybody of course, was like this, - depth beyond depth, a universe chorally singing, incalculable, obeying tremendous laws, chemical or divine, of which it was able to give its own consciousness not the faintest inkling… He brushed the dark hair of this universe. He looked into its tranquil black-pooled eyes. Its mouth was humorous and bitter. And this universe would go out and talk inanely to other universes – talking only with some strange minute fraction of its identity, like a vast sea leaving on the shore, for all mention of itself, a single white pebble, meaningless. A universe that contained everything – all things – yet said only one word: ‘I.’ A music, an infinite symphony, beautifully and majestically conducting itself there in the darkness, but remaining for ever unread and unheard.”
― Conrad Aiken, Blue Voyage: A Novel

“All is insanity… Who so among you that is without insanity, let him think the first think…”
― Conrad Aiken, Blue Voyage

“It is precisely the sort of thing I am always trying to do in my writing – to present my unhappy reader with a wide-ranged chaos – of actions and reactions, thoughts, memories and feelings – in the vain hope that at the end he will see that the whole thing represents only one moment, one feeling, one person. A raging, trumpeting jungle of associations, and then I announce at the end of it, with a gesture of despair, 'This is I!”
― Conrad Aiken, Blue Voyage

“Who is this little, this pathetic, this ridiculous Demarest? We laugh at him, and also we weep for him; for he is ourselves, he is humanity, he is God. He makes mistakes. He is an egoist. He is imperfect—physically, morally, and mentally. Coffee disagrees with him; angostura causes him anguish; borborigmi interrupts his sleep, causing in his dreams falls of cliffs and the all-dreaded thunderstone; his ears ache; his nostrils, edematous; frontal headaches… Nevertheless, like ourselves, whose disabilities differ from his only in details, he struggles—why? to avoid the making of mistakes, to escape the tyrant solipsism, and to know himself; like us, he endeavors to return to God. Let him cry out as he will, let him protest his skepticism ever so loudly, he is at heart, like every other, a believer in perfection!”
― Conrad Aiken, Blue Voyage

“This is merely the announcement of that perfect communion of which I have often dreamed. They have lost their individualities, certainly—but was individuality necessary to them? Or is it possible that, having lost their personalities, they have lost that alone by which harmony or discord was perceptible? Or is it only that their individualities have been refined by self-awareness, so that the feelings no longer intrude, nor the passions tyrannize, bringing misery?…”
― Conrad Aiken, Blue Voyage

“It was perhaps the sound of Smith, giving himself a body in the darkness; or Faubion, coming up out of the unfathomable with a short sigh; or Silberstein, muttering as he clove the cobweb of oblivion in which he found himself enshrouded; or Cynthia, waking from granite into starlight. It was perhaps only the little sound of the atom falling in his mind, the atom falling like a star from one constellation to another, molecular disaster, infinitesimal tick, which, in its passage, created, illuminated and then destroyed this night, this ship, the corposants.”
― Conrad Aiken, Blue Voyage

“If one could only establish a direct mode of communion with another being, instead of undergoing this pitiful struggle of conversation? Extraordinary, the way conversation, even the most intimate (not at present apropos) concealed or refracted the two personalities engaged. Impossible to present, all at once, in a phrase, a sentence, a careful paragraph—even in a book, copious and disheveled—all that one meant or all that one was. To speak is to simplify, to simplify is to change, to change is to falsify. And not only this—there were also the special demons who inhabit language; and again, the demons who make a perpetual comedy, or tragedy, of all human intercourse, the comedies and tragedies of the misunderstood. These were the same thing—or aspects of the same thing?”
― Conrad Aiken, Blue Voyage

“What is man that thou art mindful of him? Melancholy. Men, in a smoking room, recounting their conquests to one another. Was it, as always assumed, a mere boastfulness, a mere rooster crow from the dunghill? No… It was the passionate desire to recreate, to live over again those inestimable instants of life, so tragically few, so irrecoverably lost. ‘That reminds me of one time when I was staying——’ Yes, you can see the wretched man trying to summon them back, those few paltry episodes, and make of them, for his solace, a tiny immortal bouquet.”
― Conrad Aiken, Blue Voyage

“Know thyself! That was the best joke ever perpetrated. A steaming universe of germ-cells, a maelstrom of animal forces, of which he himself, his personality, was only the collective gleam.”
― Conrad Aiken, Blue Voyage