The Moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the Moon that pulls the tides, and the Moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the Moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist…. When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness..

—

D.H. Lawrence

 

I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN IT. I REMEMBER DUSK THERE, AT ABOUT THIS TIME OF YEAR: DARKNESS FALLS, DRY AND RUSTLING, OVER THE ROOFTOPS BLUE WITH SMOKE; THE CITY GIVES OFF A DULL RUMBLING SOUND AND THE RIVER SEEMS TO HAVE TURNED BACK IN ITS COURSE. I USED TO WANDER THROUGH THE STREETS, THEN. THEY, TOO, ARE WANDERING, NOW, I KNOW! THEY ARE WANDERING, PRETENDING TO BE IN A HURRY TO GET BACK TO THEIR WEARY HOUSEWIVES AND THEIR STERN HOMES … OH, MY FRIEND: DO YOU KNOW WHAT HE IS, THAT SOLITARY CREATURE, WANDERING IN THE GREAT CITIES …?

—

From Albert Camus’s The Fall (1956)

 

 

"Tell me this string of selves ends in light."

Avni Vyas: Minotaur's Love Song

src 

 “I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter.  

We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.

For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves.”

 James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves


src

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

 Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night


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If you alone could hear someone upset on the other side of the world, then maybe then you could do something about it. I was once in these mountains, you’d see these fires, other people sleeping out in the mountains, traders across the border, and that gives you this feeling, night time, awareness of other people sleeping. But all it is just a fire light. You see their firelight and you know they are there, that’s all you need. That’s what ties cities to places that aren’t together, deserts, forests, people. You watch over your city or area at night, you see the distant lights, fires burning in other places.

   Burial
   x

"What if, on a crowded street, you look up and see something appear that should not, given what we know, be there. You either shake your head and dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than we think. Perhaps it really is a doorway to another place. If you choose to go inside you may find many unexpected things."

Shigeru Miyamoto

“ The planet does not need more ‘successful people’. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds. It needs people to live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture is the set. ”

 Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalai Lama


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“We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons."

Terence McKenna

"If someone told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine of them would be blank. On the last page I would write, “I recognize only one duty and that is to love.” And as far as everything else is concerned, I say no."

   Albert Camus

All she wanted
was the smell of the sea, of disappearance.

 Louise Glück

We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.

 E. Merrill Root

Goodbye old friend, demon cleanser, touchstone, my inspiration on everything I have ever done - I am crying for you tonight in your native land. I want to know you’re happy where you’ve landed and save me a spot next to you please.(and Kurt) I love you Leonard. I love you so much. I’m sorry I never got to tell you. Rest in peace and exultation. xxxxx

Courtney’s reaction to the passing of Leonard Cohen


via: http://fuckyeahcourtneylove.com

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”

  -      Jack Kerouac, On the Road    

People with dark souls have nothing but dark dreams.
People with really dark souls do nothing but dream. 

Haruki Murakami

     

"Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are. Please don’t dislike me. What is the mystery of the world? Nobody knows they’re angels."

   
(Kerouac to Ginsberg in a letter from January 13, 1950)

“I wish they would take me as I am.”    

 Vincent van Gogh

"I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange."

 Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks (1990)

Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air.


Pablo Neruda, excerpt from “Sonnet XCIV”

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet