Naima Muzaffar > Naima's Quotes

“Where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s own taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface, was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Somewhere
someone
thinks they love
someone else
exactly like
I
love you.
Somewhere
someone shakes
from the ripple
of a thousand butterflies
inside a
single stomach.
Somewhere
someone
is packing their
bags
to see the world
with someone
else.
Somewhere
someone
is reaching through
the most
terrifying few
feet of space
to hold the
hand
of someone
else.
Somewhere
someone
is watching
someone else’s
chest
rise and fall
with the
breath
of slumber.
Somewhere
someone
is pouring
ink like blood
onto pages
fighting
to say the truth
that has
no words.
Somewhere
someone
is waiting
patient
but exhausted
to just
be
with someone
else.
Somewhere
someone
is opening
their eyes
to a sunrise
in someplace
they have never
seen.
Somewhere
someone
is pulling out
the petals
twisting the
apple stem
picking up
the heads up penny
rubbing the
rabbits foot
knocking on
wood
throwing
coins into
fountains
hunting for
the only clover
with only 4 leaves
skipping over
the cracks
snapping the
wishbone
crossing their
fingers
blowing out
the candles
sending dandelion
seeds into the
air
ushering eyelashes
off their thumbs
finding the first
star
and waiting for
11:11 on
their clock
to spend their
wishes
on someone
else.
Somewhere
someone
is saying
goodbye
but somewhere
someone else
is saying
hello.
Somewhere
someone
is sharing their first
or their last
kiss
with their
or no longer their
someone
else.
Somewhere
someone
is wondering
if how they feel
is how the other
they
feels about them
and if both theys
could ever become
a they
together.
Somewhere
someone
is the decoder ring
to all of
the great mysteries
of life
for someone
else.
Somewhere
someone
is the treasure map.
Somewhere
someone
thinks they love
someone else
exactly like
I
love you.
Somewhere
someone
is wrong.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“we are a scene chalked out with the sick white brush of age”
― Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned

“There is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock”
― Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned

“the courage it took to get out of bed each
morning
to face the same things
over and over
was
enormous.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“Beasts bounding through time.

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory

moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It's a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for a two week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And still-that's how you build a future.”
― Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

“I don't believe in villains or heroes--only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.”
― Tennessee Williams

“I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded as if they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Catastrophe of Success

“He is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.”
― Tennessee Williams