Ariel > Ariel's Quotes

“The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History

“Solitude sometimes is best society.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“The Brain - is wider than the Sky -
For - put them side by side -
The one the other will contain
With ease - and You - beside -

The Brain is deeper than the sea -
For- hold them - Blue to Blue -
The one the other will absorb -
As Sponges - Buckets - do -

The Brain is just the weight of God -
For - Heft them - Pound for Pound -
And they will differ - if they do -
As Syllable from Sound.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“To aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

“People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.”
― Don DeLillo, End Zone

“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
― Terence McKenna

“Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must. These Louts believe all's right now,-- that they are free to get on with Lives that to them are no doubt important,-- with no Glimmer at all of the Debt they have taken on. That is what I smell'd,-- Lethe-Water. One of the things the newly-born forget, is how terrible its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to forget ev'rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them again and again, however ye wish,-- even unto their own Dissolution. In America, as I apprehend, Time is the true River that runs 'round Hell.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
― Susan Sontag

“The motion of a swift is an impenetrable language; as incomprehensible to me as the thoughts of a flower when it opens its petals at dawn, without memory or mind. A coherent logic and a dance, but not one I can shape within myself. All my attempts are approximation. One cannot render meaning in language one finds meaningless; nevertheless I know there is a design, a speaking, a world just on the other side of shadow, untouchable but nonetheless real. Three years since I came home from Ebrekt, and I still dream of the swifts, running: in dreams, sometimes I understand them.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“Show me how this mess steps aside and lets you
make a perfect surface of unbroken colour.”
― Max Porter, The Death of Francis Bacon

“I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“Reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

“But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
― Virginia Woolf

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“We’re never inside someone else’s head. We can never really know someone else’s thoughts. And it’s thoughts that count. Thought is reality. Actions can be faked.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things