Apollo Figueiredo > Quotes

“Getting high only made me think of you more.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“I lay there. Lay there. The places we call home, are never remembered on a map. And all manic episodes start with a thought.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Another dead thing to haunt me in the night. And we will holler at lifeless crescent moons never begging for air or freedom. A flickering of a candle whose wick will not burn out as much as it will be extinguished by being drowned out. A wolf without teeth, howling his desires to unburden his soul.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“I think I finally understand what it is that you experienced in our last moments together. The fear to resign yourself to a final belief greater than yourself. It is difficult to decide what cause to believe in because of the fear that it is a lesser unworthy cause, it is not the meaning but rather a symptom of looking for meaning. And in all of our attachments we long for them to have meaning no matter how long they last. It is a scary thing to create such a drastic action that changes your life. It requires more than faith, there will be a second where only the action and what Kierkegaard called the infinite movement would have to occur. The final dance.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Degrading to atoms, conscious or not. The world was always and never falling apart.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“The abyss is black and eventually I know I will smile, laugh even knowing all I think I know, maniacally while I howl at anything I could see that would laugh, snarl and howl the way I do.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“I have felt your drool on me
And never loved you more
Then with your closed eyes
Telling my shirt that home was not full of sights
But only full of soul.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Two insane idiots with the same idea, that is what love is.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Ecce homo means behold the man. Behold the man and all his failures, if you can love him then God has forgiven and I have finally found a God worth serving with thin thighs and knots in her back. We have never kissed underneath a tree, I have never pushed your hair aside to shield the wind, I have never said whatever forces unseen and seen should be ours to smile eyes closed together. Buildings laugh at each other the way we do.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“People spend time trying to impress people through the things they do and say in a tone any louder than a gasped whisper. The mass commodification of cool is perverse in the sense that the individual defining the term has its basis in what they think others will idolise in their own individuality. If there was no ego there would be no cool. If there was no cool, people would see more beauty. They would stop seeing their lives as more important than others based on what they themselves value”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“It was in Kuala Lumpur that I saw the tree roots at the botanical gardens grow as much outside of the ground as inside. I saw what used to be the tallest building in the world still appreciated for its beauty long after it lost its title. I thought people could be like buildings, still adored despite their best years behind them. I heard the horns of cars drown out the sound of fountains spurting illuminated shades of violet and crashing against themselves and I thought it was time to leave, to head home the same way I left it; expecting things to be a different way than how they actually will work out. The actions of ones life, makes his life, and in this way things can disappear but never leave. A person that sees beauty in only the grand has never witnessed true beauty, if the abyss is to remind us of anything it is that there is beauty in nothingness and everything. The forest that has no trees, no stones, no path and no flowers is still a forest because of the feeling one can get walking through it which leaves me wondering if the grand zero is everything, that reality was a moment in which I both existed and ceased to exist.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“It is funny to think our perceptions of the world change second to second as we continue to experience more of it. And that everyone is creating their own meaning and purpose with every second that they experience. It seems impossible not to get caught up, or lost, in those moments of constantly change and we as imperfect beings surely interpret our reality in false ways because no one can know the actual truth of the world only their perception of it. The actual truth of what is best for them is always an idea. The people that say that they live in the moment, as most people do, are often forgetting that the moment in the present should be used to progress. Successes and failures are only understood in moments in the future, based on the present, during moments of clarity in retrospect. For this reason, I think its important to forgive people in order to give ourselves freedom.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Hardened, and kept jagged by the snow all I wished as I walked over the frosted dirt beneath my bare feet is that I would be able to tell the difference between good and evil.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“I looked outside your second floor living room window. I saw a view I had never thought I would see. There were trees of reddish brown hugging a river, dying but beautiful. Telling me I was so much more than a moment, and yet only a moment could define me at the present time. The future is unseen. Expecting to be better, is not always the truth. It takes something to smash your brains in, to squeeze your heart, to torture your soul in order to make you see what is in front of you”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“What is the word that describes that feeling of complete of absent mindedness mixed with a sobering clarity. Like staring at a room that has gone blindingly full of light, a whiteness that keeps your mind attentive. What is the word for that feeling and does anyone else ever feel it? Do people begin everyday with their own prayer to a nameless god that is actually the universe? Are wishes our first thoughts of the day?”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Perspective is reality, perspective can be changed, therefore reality can be too. In this way reality then becomes subjective.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“People age even in pictures. Champagne glasses can stay full. With enough of a leap you could say that pictures amongst the galaxies and quasars capture a tiny bit of the universe for however long they last. The only thing pictures cannot do is keep someone alive in anything but memory after they have passed. Some pictures although painful to look at should always stay up on our walls to remind us from time to time of who we have loved.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“All the joints and drinks in the world could only serve to remind me. I imagine myself being Gatsby watching the party that I have thrown to get to where I am. A future where there is a something. Where I am better, where I am something.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“She left me ravenous and wishing upon fireflies for more. Limbs as puzzle pieces we fit together.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“They said let go, so I tried, knowing that I have never been able to let go of anything that was already attached to my brain. Like all the other moments where I was happy, I realised, all I wanted was more time. I wanted to be stuck, to stagnate, let me be the rock that drowns, let this be my future. I have seen uninhabited islands of anonymous colours as high as the clouds they lay on just to think of you, repeating itself like a parakeet or a perfectly broken loop traveling the world to find its and our spiritual oblivion. People only stay in your life depending on how much you persist with them.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Another thing I had to learn the hard way is that once the mind is stretched by experience it can never go back to its original dimensions. No matter how desperately the alleged master of the mind wishes it could forget. That means every belief, understanding and perspective I ever have will be shaped by my past experience. Bias becomes unavoidable.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“The last step before death is the moment of its demise. The emptiness or the new life. But the last step is also a point of reference itself. The last step can last as short or as long as its creator defines it. The last step could be before death itself. It could be the middle of death. It could be the last goodbye or the last look before eyelids drop to a close like curtains.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Something I learned when I got older; your actions have a permanence. Delineations from the perfect line. Some mistakes can last a lifetime like the first brush of death. Some beliefs are worth tearing fabric for like perfect lines. It does not matter where a person has been but what they have done. There are people that can still be shallow no matter how much they travel or what they see.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“It was if I made love to a nymph of the mountains or air or wind and she had come to me to make me fall in love and leave, with some grand plan behind those actions. The last time I saw her she was just looking anywhere but me, a magical siren who I was helpless to look at staring at her distant gaze. A side profile of one of the most beautiful things I would ever see, with her hair blowing through the fall Melbourne wind.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Beauty in a dream and beauty in reality can both be witnessed first hand. Mad men and women also witness beauty in their delusions. My world is full of those delusions but perhaps so is everyone else’s since we read into things and in the reading into of things we lose their truth in order to gain some truth in insight.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“It is a dangerous thing to go back searching to your past. All things grow, that means all things change. Two parallel lines do not meet, unless in infinity. The past would always feel different experienced in the present. What if the fond memories go away if you live in them for a little while. Maybe I am going in circles cause it could go either way. Now orbits, orbits are different. Gravitational pull is at play. And if Newton’s laws are taken into account the only way to create an orbit is to have a force that pushes you into motion, but also pushes you at a distance where another orbit is able to push and pull yours in an equal way. I guess our gravity has to be flung out into the void at its own force in order to find a matching orbit.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Close your eyes, what do you think about? Not all dreams happen with your eyes closed, but the ones that do are the ones that have the most imagery, the most hope. Hope can be a dreadful thing but it can be a beautiful thing. There have been many great philosophers who have said that hope and dreams have this false sense of themselves, that they are only fragments of the real or true. They may be right about being fragments, but that does not make them any less true. Dreams send us guiding towards ideas, that are true themselves, if only ideals, of goals that we should strive towards. It is cliche and commonplace to call dreams fantasies of the mind, wishful thinking of fading things. Yet there are things that philosophers cannot explain, that reason leaves, all philosophers believe themselves poets but leave the soul out of their writing. The mind and its reason, that is truth. That is the belief. Yet anyone who has looked at a view that has left them without breath has known of something more.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“I remember I thought that she smelled like something I had never smelt before, but it was the sweetest scent. I could not describe it, but it was like a picture. A painting I had wanted to see my whole life. She was rainy mornings, and the view of cars going by in blurs while you sat still. She was the moon, that was full, but you know could empty if there ever was a sadness. The emptiness is the part I hated. It was a feeling that made you empty to reciprocate hers, it was a feeling that when she was full she could make you full too.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“Kings and Queens were once the rulers of lands, they did this under the supervision of God, their own rule was sanctioned by the divine right they were granted under these Gods. They themselves alone concluded that their lineage was supported by supremacy over others. By this they ruled over all people. Those who believed their stories. The Church supported the rulers who further established their respective religions. And so humans dared to dream and killed their Gods by killing their royalty. Exile was not enough, the only way their subservience would be eliminated was to murder without righteousness or virtue. If the apple is the symbol of knowledge then God wanted us to stay ignorant in order not to die itself.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke

“We had sat on a bench to take a moments break earlier and we discussed the possibility of always being this high, obviously in love with the feeling of the world being perfect. Daren was sold on this possibility, thinking that this was the way to happiness. As happy as it made me I knew it was an experience that could not be repeated. When an experience is new or when it has not been felt in a long time, that is when it is its most profound. I knew it could not be repeated the same way. Beauty is so rarely repeated in experience. So they say, pleasure comes in halves.”
― Apollo Figueiredo, A Laugh in the Spoke