Gary > Gary's Quotes

“Επιθυμίες
Σαν σώματα ωραία νεκρών που δεν εγέρασαν
και τάκλεισαν, με δάκρυα, σε μαυσωλείο λαμπρό,
με ρόδα στο κεφάλι και στα πόδια γιασεμιά --
έτσ' η επιθυμίες μοιάζουν που επέρασαν
χωρίς να εκπληρωθούν· χωρίς ν' αξιωθεί καμιά
της ηδονής μια νύχτα, ή ένα πρωϊ της φεγγερό."

Desires
"Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears, in a brilliant mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet --
this is what desires resemble that have passed
without fulfillment; without any of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a morning of brightness.”
― Constantine P. Cavafy, Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems

“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.”
― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

“You know a real friend?
Someone you know will look after your cat after you are gone.”
― William S. Burroughs, Last Words: The Final Journals

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“One is always half mad when one is shy of people.”
― Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten

“Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us.”
― Sir Thomas Browne

“At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.”
― Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.”
― Alberto Moravia, Contempt

“We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.”
― E.M. Cioran

“In my next life I want to be a cat. To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late”
― Charles Bukowski

“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”
― Emil Cioran

“Al igual que amas los libros que te hacen llorar, las sonatas que te han cortado el aliento, los perfumes que te insinúan renunciamientos, a las mujeres extraviadas entre el cuerpo y el alma, así sucede con los mares: te enamoras de aquellos cuyo oleaje induce a ahogarse en su seno.”
― Emil Cioran, Breviario de los vencidos

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“The idle apprehend more things, are deeper than the industrious: no task limits their horizon; born into an eternal Sunday, they watch-—and watch themselves watching. Sloth is a somatic skepticism, the way the flesh doubts. In a world of inaction, the idle would be the only ones not to be murderers. But they do not belong to humanity, and, sweat not being their strong point, they live without suffering the consequences of Life and of Sin. Doing neither good nor evil, they disdain—spectators of the human convulsion—the weeks of time, the efforts which asphyxiate consciousness. What would they have to fear from a limitless extension of certain afternoons except the regret of having supported a crudely elementary obviousness? Then, exasperation in the truth might induce them to imitate the others and to indulge in the degrading temptation of tasks. This is the danger which threatens sloth, that miraculous residue of paradise.”
― E.M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.”
― Friedrich Hölderlin

“They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren’t good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the the one that dies. It’s like the ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just this was for an epitaph”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“Our power resides in our incapacity to know how alone we are.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.”
― Émile Michel Cioran, The New Gods

“¿El arte de amar ? Saber unir el temperamento de un vampiro y la discreción de una anémona.”
― Emil Cioran, All Gall is Divided: Aphorisms

“En un mundo sin melancolía, los ruiseñores se pondrían a eructar.”
― Emil Cioran, All Gall is Divided: Aphorisms

“When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Unknowing, let us sleep. Chest against chest,
Our breathing mingled, hand in hand without dreams.”
― Yves Bonnefoy, The Curved Planks: Poems

“I wonder through the days like a whore in a world with no sidewalks.”
― Emil Cioran