2015 Part I

I felt like I was sort of disappearing. It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing everytime you crossed a road. 
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

No — all is perfect; let me be lost. 
The New World (2005)

Dreary, confused, introverted narcissist […] downcast, secretive, almost Goth in her black moodiness, she is the epitome of an unhappy egotist. She is so consumed with the ups and downs of her own depression and self-loathing, she just doesn’t have the energy to look outward. Her misery is her mirror, and she’s forever gazing into it. 
Matthew Gilbert of The Boston Globe describing Jenny Schecter

The films that I like, they hurt a bit. 
The Story of Film: An Odyssey

I drifted into indiscipline and intellectual adventure that eventually became complete confusion. 
Carl Solomon

I have finally learned that I must remain silent as much as possible. I must always keep my thoughts to myself. 
Sadegh Hedayat

I may be going nowhere, but what a ride. 
Shaun Hick 

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece. 
Emil Cioran, from On The Heights Of Despair 

Surviving one’s own life, living on the other side of it like a spectator, is quite comfortable after all. You no longer expect anything, no longer fear anything, and every hour is like a memory. 
Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

To live at this level of freedom you must learn not to be afraid of inner pain and disturbance. As long as you are afraid of the pain, you will try to protect yourself from it. The fear will make you do that. If you want to be free, simply view inner pain as a temporary shift in your energy flow. There is no reason to fear this experience. 
Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul

I tremble in fear and adoration of whatever exists. 
Clarice Lispector — from The Passion According to G. H. trans. Idra Novey

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. 
Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP

And if you lose, does it really matter? Is there anything to win in this world? All gain is a loss, and all loss is a gain. Why always expect a definite stance, clear ideas, meaningful words? I feel as if I should spout fire in response to all the questions which were ever put, or not put, to me.

— Emil Cioran, from “Nothing Matters,” On The Heights Of Despair (University Of Chicago Press,1996)

It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don’t know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much only in a different way.
Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger

When I’m not doing something that comes deeply from me, I get bored. When I get bored I get distracted and when I get distracted, I become depressed. It’s a natural resistance, and it insures your integrity.
Maria Irene Fornes

All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.
Jacques Lacan, from Seminar II 

Do not create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.
John Cage

The only rule is to work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
John Cage 

Inspiration presents itself to me in the form of anxiety.
Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals & Notebooks (1947-1963) 

My ambition was to live like music.
Mary Gaitskill

I don’t know if this is true to you but for me sometimes it gets so bad that anything else say like looking at a bird on an overhead power line seems as great as a Beethoven symphony. then you forget it and you’re back again.
Charles Bukowski, “A Moment” 

Who
is invisible enough
to see you 

Paul Celan

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans… If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication … and there is the real illness.
Philip K. Dick

You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
Albert Camus, Notebooks

I stood there—boy, I was freezing to death—and I kept saying goodbye to myself, “Good-bye, Caulfield. Goodbye, you slob.” I kept seeing myself throwing a football around, with Buhler and Jackson, just before it got dark on the September evenings, and I knew I’d never throw a football around ever again with the same guys at the same time. It was as though Buhler and Jackson and I had done something that had died and been buried, and only I knew about it, and no one was at the funeral but me. So I stood there, freezing. 

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates. 
Emil Cioran

In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy - because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. Some of the spies are detached observers, such are glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away.

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols”

It is often impossible to really understand a narcissist. The evasive syntax fast deteriorates into ever more labyrinthine structures. The grammar tortured to produce the verbal Doppler shifts essential to disguise the source of the information, its distance from reality, the speed of its degeneration into rigid “official” versions.

…

Narcissists, therefore, never talk to others - rather, they talk at others. They exchange subtexts, camouflage-wrapped by elaborate, florid, texts. They read between the lines, spawning a multitude of private languages, prejudices, superstitions, conspiracy theories, rumours, phobias and hysterias. Theirs is a solipsistic world - where communication is permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is to throw others off the scent or to obtain Narcissistic Supply.

The narcissist’s inability to listen and pay genuine attention stems from his overriding need to sustain his grandiosity and to rehearse his next lines, retort, or clever response while his interlocutor - really merely his audience - is talking. After all: why should the narcissist waste his precious time on listening when he is omniscient?
…

The rules that govern the narcissist’s universe are loopholed incomprehensibles, open to an exegesis so wide and so self-contradictory that it renders them meaningless. The narcissist  often hangs himself by his own verbose Gordic knots, having stumbled through a minefield of logical fallacies and endured self inflicted inconsistencies. Unfinished sentences hover in the air, like vapour above a semantic swamp.

Sam Vaknin, “The Narcissist’s Weapon of Language”

Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!
To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!
What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!
I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.
I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,
Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.
I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.
I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.
It’s too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have been at the same time,
Deliberately at the same time…
No matter, I’ll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics.
This spectator aspect of life is so amusing!
I can’t even light the next cigarette… If it’s an action,
It can wait for me, along with the others, in the nonmeeting called life.
Fernando Pessoa

I generally think that the strangest people look very conventional, very typical. That’s because, the man who is really strange inside, the one who is in a deep misunderstanding with the world that doesn’t accept nor understand him, doesn’t feel any need to decorate himself on the outside, to attract anyone’s attention. Is there any stranger creature than Kafka, for example, who worked in an insurance company in Prague almost all his life, all the while not distinguishing himself on the outside from others clerks.
Momo Kapor, Una 

Most working people just don’t have any say in the creative content of their own labor; that’s part of the definition of being a worker, you trade your labor to someone else and they get to tell you what to do. So, the idea that there is a category of person in society who both gets to do, to a certain extent, what they want and make money doing it takes on some kind of special aura because it is an exception: precisely because most people are alienated in their work, the dream of being an “artist” takes on some exaggerated societal importance as an image—even though the reality for most “working artists” is more complex, and most people who call themselves “artists” actually make money somewhere else.

In truth, the fact that people present themselves as “actually” an artist and only temporarily or incidentally an office worker or whatever shows the powerful ideological function this idea of the “artist” holds on people, as this kind of imaginary escape.

From that angle, the “aura of mystery” is not a pure illusion. There is something really mysterious about contemporary art that makes it seem like this carnival of individualisms; the conditions of being a professional artist are just not the same as the conditions faced elsewhere, even elsewhere in the creative economy. The art-school industry in some ways sells a highly commodified version of the idea of escaping normal labor.

How Small It Actually Is, Alex Zafiris interviews Ben Davis - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

Terror made me cruel
Emily Brontë 

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It’s not something that committees can do. It’s not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It’s done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world. 

Robert Hughes

Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside.
Hugh Macleod 

Create your own values of culture and put it against the values that you do not like, Just
don’t complain, don’t lapse into the culture of complaint — roll up your sleeves and create your own art, create your own values, create your own cultural values, that’s what going to change things. 

…but I am too tired to write, too driven, too screaming inside. I feel too fiercely to write, even to talk. It is no good to be alone either; though one makes no noise the screaming is all there.
Martha Gellhorn, from Selected Letters 

Writing poems is easy. Writing good poems is difficult. Writing a great poem is almost impossible. This is why I try not to think about it. If I contemplated how many actual great poems there are in the world, and how hard it is to write one, I would give up. I think poets, and artists in general, have to have this combination of audacity and humbleness. On the one hand, you have to have this grand and supreme faith in yourself that what you see, hear, touch, taste, think and feel, has importance, and will be meaningful to another human being. On the other hand, you have to know deep down that what you are trying to do is impossible, unattainable, unfeasible, impractical, out of the question, and completely hopeless. And then you try anyway.
Dorianne Laux, from an interview 

I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves

That, friends, is all I want.
Next to everything, close to nothing.
Pablo Neruda 

What I cannot say, is me.
Adrienne Rich, from Later Poems Selected And New: 1971 - 2012 

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.
Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats, from a letter

Progress means simplifying, not complicating.
Bruno Munari.

The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous.
Paul Rand

What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures.
Gustave Flaubert

That is what I am, pursuit of the wind.
Marguerite Duras, from No More 

The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous.
Paul Rand

I promise you nothing is as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth diminishing your health. Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear.
Steve Maraboli

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!
Eugene O'Neill

Be so very light. Be a gentle whisper.
Bob Ross

They didn’t want to write they wanted to succeed at writing.
Charles Bukowski - The Last Night of the Earth Poems 

You will give me a headache if you make me think today. I cannot think today. I feel too natural, too beautifully common.
James Joyce, from Exiles: A Play In Three Acts 

…I do not know why I care so much except that I am an egotist and a perfectionist.
Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry 

Interviewer: Mr. Ligotti, how are you?

Thomas Ligotti: A simple question, but for some reason it triggers something I once read in Kafka’s letters. Kafka remarked to a correspondent that his emotional state was so unstable that, as he stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs, he had no idea how he would feel when he had reached to the top of the stairs. Anyway, in answer to your question, I’m not feeling too bad at the moment.

I don’t like myself. I only feel a touch of sympathy, and even less respect, for myself; what’s more, I don’t interest myself much. As a teenager, then as a young man, I was full of myself; this is no longer the case. The mere prospect of having to recount a personal anecdote plunges me into boredom verging on catalepsy. When I absolutely have to, I just lie.
Michel Houellebecq, Lanzarote

Now listen kid, modesty is supposed to be a virtue – it is NOT – it is a serious mistake. You’ve got to stop running yourself down. Be imposing, be hard to get, do not let them get you.
Martha Gellhorn, from Selected Letters 

He lit a cigarette. His glass of whiskey lit a cigarette. “I can only truly love my dead best friend,” he said, “but not in a gay way. Women wouldn’t understand. They’re too gay.” Both of the cigarettes agreed.
from Mallory Ortberg’s hilarious “Male Novelist Jokes.” 

Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.
Muriel Barbery

I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.
Sylvia Plath, from Johnny Panic and The Bible of Dreams 

Now I must learn to shut up. I must train myself to shut the hell up. I must allow myself to freely internalize what needs to be internalized and make the process meaningful at all cost.
Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals 

I am not concerned with the exit, I am obsessively fascinated with the labyrinth. I fixate on the beauty of it. Never mind the exit. I tell you, my dear, never mind…
Anne Sexton, from A Self-Portrait In Letters 

You represent something to me. So rare. Is it too dumb or trite or feminine to say I love your soul?
Anne Sexton, from A Self-Portrait In Letters 

Making something a secret was a way of giving it value. She would say that creative people must deal in secrets—if your secrets disappear, you are nothing.
Patricia Bosworth, from Diane Arbus: A Biography 

I would look up at the moon and see that it was not the smooth orb we had all believed, but a pitted and scarred world with no air.
Christopher Pike

You couldn’t hide from bad things and pretend they didn’t exist–that left you with a dream world, and dream worlds eventually crumbled. You had to face the truth. And then decide what you wanted.
Sarah Cross

I feel madness in the air like a smell. Nothing strikes me as rational anywhere.
Martha Gellhorn, from Selected Letters 

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver

My world is based on passion. I am in no need of “insisting” upon being loved. I’m immersed and flooded in this. That is why I am happy and full of power and find friendship pale by comparison.
Anaïs Nin, from a letter to C.L. Baldwin

Earth is what I feel for you.
Andrzej Żuławski, On the Silver Globe 

The joy of being alone, eating the honey of words.
Robert Bly, from “It’s as if Someone Else Is with Me,” Eating the Honey of Words (HarperCollins,1999)

I want to meet no one; I want to say nothing;
I want to go down and rest in the black earth of silence.
Robert Bly, from “Depression,” Eating the Honey of Words (HarperCollins, 1999)

There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don’t quite reach it.
from The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950 - 1962

It’s nonsense, as I have always believed, to imagine that one’s personality changes very much over the course of years. It expands, that’s all. Much that is unconscious becomes conscious. But I rather doubt that the external world contributes much to the quality of personality.
Joyce Carol Oates, from a journal entry

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones.
Ray Bradbury

No one is you and that is your power. 

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.
Louis L’amour 

If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint’, then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
Vincent Van Gogh

I used to worry desperately about wasting time because I saw myself as basically lazy (which I am) and also saw my time wasting as proof of a second rate brain (which I also have.) Perhaps I also felt it was sinful because such a pleasure. I now think it is as necessary as solitude; that’s how the compost heap grows in the mind. Anyway I intend to spend the rest of my life wasting time.
Martha Gellhorn, from Selected Letters 

People talk about escapism as if it’s a bad thing… Once you’ve escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn’t have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.
Neil Gaiman

i’m post-nihilism because nothing mattering doesn’t matter

One clear stanza can take more weight

Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.

Czeslaw Milosz, from The Collected Poems 

When a person tells you you hurt them, you don’t get to decide you didn’t.
Louis C.K

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason.
Czeslaw Milosz, from The Collected Poems 

You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future.
Susan Sontag, from Letter to Borges

This is the silence of astounded souls.
Sylvia Plath, from “Crossing the Water"

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason.
Czeslaw Milosz, from The Collected Poems 

[the poet’s mind is] a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feeling, phrases and images, which remain there until all the particles, which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, 1919.

Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.
Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer 

Let’s get really fucked up and full of sentimental despair and then finally decide life, despite very heartbreak and anguished cry, is worth each pulse and breath.
Jim Dodge

The job of the poet (a job which can’t be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.
Cocteau, p.12, “La Mort et les Statues”, Paris, 1977.

Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes
John Waters (Rhode Island School of Design commencement speech, 2015) 

I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms, untried pleasures.
Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow.
Sylvia Plath - from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

A dream job does not exist. You have to create it.
Hedonist Poet

It all ends in tears anyway.
Jack Kerouac

Love in the real world means saying you’re sorry 10 times a day.
Kathie Lee Gifford

…and as soon as I cease to be natural I am nothing at all.
André Gide, from a journal entry 

You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don’t feel it, nothing will happen.
William Bernbach

The only writing technique that is worth anything is the one that emotion itself has created and can invent again when need be. I want to write nothing except under pressure of necessity.
André Gide, from a journal entry 

Story is important, but the pictures have to be interesting.
Akira Kurosawa 

Do not be afraid to be weak.
Do not be ashamed to be tired.
You look good when you’re tired.
You look like you could go on forever.
Leonard Cohen, “How to Speak Poetry” 

By the way you keep asking questions. Questions that get you nowhere.
Marguerite Duras, from Destroy, She Said 

You should love for no reason.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov . 

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
Roland Barthes

There are always moments when one feels empty and estranged.
 Such moments are most desirable; 
for it means the soul has cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places. 
This is detachment; when the old is over and the new has not yet come. 
If you are afraid, the state may be distressing, 
but there is really nothing to be afraid of. 
Remember the instruction: 
Whatever you come across – go beyond.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj 

Sometimes, when I’m closing my browser tabs, I pause to look at one and remember the man I was then.
Josh Hara

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Pablo Picasso. 

The future is a concept, it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.
Alan Watts

See that the whole existence is celebrating. These trees are not serious, these birds are not serious. The rivers and the oceans are wild, and everywhere there is fun, everywhere there is joy and delight. Watch existence, listen to the existence and become part of it.
Osho