"How does seeing one´s self as no-self (anatman), as impermanent (annica) and empty (sunyata), as neither diachronically nor synchronically possessed of an immutable essence, help alleviate personal suffering? The answer is complicated. Suffering has many sources. Suppose I have a great meal or a great sexual experience. It is over. I have good memories of the experience but I am disappointed that it is over. All good things come to an end. Things change, I change. That´s the nature of things. If I understand and accept this, my attitude to passing good experiences become more accepting. It is in the nature of the universe that all things myself included change. But I, this continuous being, had the experience. If it wad good, I can revisit it in memory as often as I wish. That´s fine so long as I don´t make the mistake of wanting it again now, that exact same experience. Wanting in this way would involve a cognitive error, wishing for what is impossible: to possess what is in the past now, exactly as it was."
— Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva´s Brain, p. 125 (via ranchocarne)
"Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions."
— J.D. Salinger, Teddy (via cabrapreta, dislate)
"And you, whiner, who wastes your time
Dawdling over the remorseless earth,
What evil, what unspeakable crime
Have you made your life worth?"
— W. D. Snodgrass (via cabrapreta)
"I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind."
— Anne Sexton (via cabrapreta)
"In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language. In my case, words came first of all; then—belatedly, with every appearance of extreme reluctance, and already clothed in concepts—came the flesh. It was, as goes without saying, sadly wasted by words."
— Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel (via cabrapreta)
"Madame, for your newefangelnesse
Many a servaunt have ye put out of grace.
I take my leve of your unstedfastnesse,
For wel I wot, whyl ye have lyves space,
Ye can not love ful half yeer in a place,
To newe thing your lust is ay so kene.
In stede of blew, thus may ye were al grene."
— Chaucer, Against women unconstant (via cabrapreta)
"Aus grauen Zimmern treten Engel mit kotgefleckten Flügeln.
Würmer tropfen von ihren vergilbten Lidern."
— Georg Trakl, Psalm (via cabrapreta)
"Modernism brings out the dark drives that slumber in us. It reserves no place for the unexplainable or the mysterious - and for precisely that reason causes a return to barbarism. (…) We need mystery, that little bit of poetry. Seeing everything makes you sad."
— J.G. Ballard (via cabrapreta)
"Every language
is a foreign language,
an invasion
from outside of space."
— Robert Kelly, Invaders (via cabrapreta)
"Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone —
Man has created death."
— W.B. Yeats, Death (via cabrapreta)
"I thought: The stars are dots. Then I thought of every human being as a dot too, but realized sadly that most of us could barely light up a room. We’re too small to be dots."
— Steve Toltz, A fraction of the whole (via cabrapreta)
"It happens when people see Death, which is all the time. They see Death but they perceive Light. They feel their own death and they call it God."
— Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole (via cabrapreta)
"In superstition the carcass is something to be feared, dreaded and hated; in fact it deserves no emotion whatsoever in and of itself, unless it happens to constitute a souvenir of somebody other than a stranger; but time spent in company of death is time wasted. Life trickles away, like the water falling down into the catacombs, and in the end we will be silent as our ancestors are silent, so better to indulge our vain grandeurs while we can."
— William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down (via cabrapreta)
"Continual connectivity has led to a new sensibility. People move from a way of thinking in which they say, ‘I have a feeling, I want to make a call,’ to one where they say, ‘I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text (or post on a social network).’ Social networking nurtures a way of thinking about the self in which one constitutes a feeling by sending out for comments."
— Sherry Turkle in [Plazm Magazine] (via ranchocarne)
(Source: taryncowart, via ranchocarne)
"When it comes to complexity in novels, it is lost on most people. Worse than lost, it will likely make a text incomprehensible to most people. Because most people, whilst literate, just aren’t very good at reading. Dense, poetic prose, rich in symbolism and thematic depth, the things us writerly smarty pants all love so much, will just confuse the hell out of most people."
— Damien G. Walter
