Leon Soma > Leon's Quotes

“What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems

“As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.”
― Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble

“My mother, writing from France, admonished me to take care of my health as she had during the war. My head could be all set for the guillotine, and still my mother would scold me for forgetting my muffler. She never missed an opportunity to try and convince me that the world is a kindly place and that she'd done a good job in conceiving me. This alleged Providence was the great subterfuge of maternal thoughtlessness.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Now was the time to make quick tracks. Back to Fort-Gono, retrace my steps? Try to explain my conduct and the circumstances of the present disaster? I hesitated . . . Not for long. Nothing can be explained. The world only knows how to do one thing, to roll over and kill you, as a sleeper kills his fleas. That would be a stupid way to die, I said to myself, to let myself be crushed like everybody else. To put your trust in men is to get yourself killed a little.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“If only I had met Molly sooner, when it was still possible to choose one road rather than another. Before that bitch Musyne and that little turd Lola crimped my enthusiasm. But it was too late to start being young again. I didn't believe in it anymore. We grow old so quickly and, what's more, irremediably. You can tell by the way you start loving your misery in spite of yourself. Nature is stronger than we are, no two ways about it. She tries us in one particular mold, and we're never able to throw it off. I had started out as the restless type. Little by little, without realizing it, you begin to take your role and fate seriously, and before you know it, it's too late to change. You're a hundred-percent restless, and it's set that way for good.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“The mother was looking at nothing and listening to nothing but herself. “It’ll kill me, doctor! I’ll die of shame!” I made no attempt to dissuade her. I didn’t know what to do. We could see the father pacing back and forth in the little dining room next door. Apparently he hadn’t finished composing his attitude for the occasion. Maybe he was waiting for things to come to a head before selecting a posture. He was in a kind of limbo. People live from one play to the next. In between, before the curtain goes up, they don’t quite know what the plot will be or what part will be right for them, they stand there at a loss, waiting to see what will happen, their instincts folded up like an umbrella, squirming, incoherent, reduced to themselves, that is, to nothing. Cows without a train.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“Then you're not coming? You'd rather go to the pen? Okay! . . . You don't care if I turn you in? ... You don't
care if I love you or not? . . . You don't care about my future? You don't care about anything, do you? . . .”
"No," he says. "In a way you're right . . . But it's not just you ... I don't care about anyone else either . . . Christ, don't take it as an insult! ... I know you're a sweet kid . . . But I don't want to be loved anymore ... It disgusts me! . . .”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be. Then I was no longer
that sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved, but a wall gave way and I filled with roots and tame stems for example, stakes long since dead and ready for burning, the recess of night and the imminence of dawn, and then the labour of the planet rolling eager into winter, winter would rid it of these contemptible scabs”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“Mi cabeza es un laberinto oscuro. A veces hay como relámpagos que iluminan algunos corredores. Nunca termino de saber por qué hago ciertas cosas.”
― Ernesto Sabato, El túnel

“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Não sou nada.
Nunca serei nada.
Não posso querer ser nada.
À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Tabacaria e Outros Poemas

“Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of a great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“VII
From my village I see as much of the universe as can be seen
from the earth,
And so my village is as large as any town,
For I am the size of what I see
And not the size of my height . . .

In the cities life is smaller
Than here in my house on top of this hill.
The big buildings of cities lock up the view,
They hide the horizon, pulling our gaze far away from the
open sky.
They make us small, for they take away all the vastness our
eyes can see,
And they make us poor, for our only wealth is seeing.”
― Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

“There are inner sufferings so subtle and so diffuse that we can’t tell whether they belong to the body or the soul, whether they’re an anxiety that comes from our feeling that life is futile or an indisposition originating in some organic abyss such as the stomach, liver or brain. How often my normal self-awareness becomes turbid with the stirred dregs of an anguished stagnation! How often it hurts me to exist, with a nausea so indefinite I’m not sure if it’s tedium or a warning that I’m about to vomit! How often…”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I’m older than Time and Space, because I’m conscious. Things derive from me; the whole of Nature is the offspring of my sensations.

I seek and I don’t find. I want and can’t have.

Without me the sun rises and expires; without me the rain falls and the wind howls. It’s not because of me that there are seasons, the twelve months, time’s passage.

Lord of the world in me which, like earthly lands, I can’t take with me (...)”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.”
― Franz Kafka

“Hay en la obsesión de lo absoluto un gusto por la autodestrucción. De ahí la fascinación que ejercen el convento y el burdel. "Celdas" y "mujeres" por todas partes. El asco de vivir crece tanto a la sombra de la santa como de las putas.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“El Árbol de la Vida no conocerá ya primavera: es madera seca; de él, harán ataúdes para nuestros huesos, nuestros sueños y nuestros dolores.”
― Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“En las crisis místicas, los gemidos de las víctimas son paralelos a los gemidos del éxtasis.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Short History of Decay

“Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith—of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“It is a funny thing. A man can make a promise to his God, break it five minutes later and never think about it. With an idle shrug of his shoulders, a man can break solemn promises to his mother, wife or sweetheart, and, except for a slight momentary twinge of conscience, he still won't be bothered very much. But if a man ever breaks a promise to himself he disintegrates. His entire personality and character crumble into tiny pieces, and he is never the same man again.
I remember very well a sergeant I knew in the army. Before a group of five men he swore off smoking forever. An hour later he sheepishly lit a cigarette and broke his vow to the five of us and to himself. He was never quite the same man again, not to me, and not to himself.”
― Charles Willeford, Cockfighter

“All I had left was a folded ten-dollar bill in my watch pocket and one dead chicken.”
― Charles Willeford, Cockfighter

“No one, other than myself, knew about my vow, and I could have broken it at any time without losing face. But I would know, and I had to shave every day.”
― Charles Willeford, Cockfighter

“A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”
― E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Tener miedo es pensar continuamente en sí mismo y no poder imaginar un curso objetivo de las cosas. La sensación de lo terrible, la sensación de que todo ocurre contra uno, supone un mundo concebido sin peligros indiferentes.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Short History of Decay

“Un gorila que perdió sus pelos y los reemplazó por ideales, un gorila con guantes, forjador de dioses, agravando sus muecas y adorando al cielo, ¡cuánto debió sufrir la naturaleza, cuánto sufrirá todavía, ante semejante caída!”
― Emil M. Cioran, Short History of Decay