David > David's Quotes

“Melancholy

(1) An excess of black bile, anatomized by Robert Burton, embraced by the swooning Romantics as evidence of their fine sensibilities, now fallen into disrepair, renamed as depression, wrongly attributed to a deficiency of serotonin and cured by infantilizing, self-indulgent 'therapy' and overpriced, addictive drugs pushed on harassed, gullible doctors by unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies which suppress their terrible side-effects in order to pursue their profits.

(2) A crippling disease of unknown aetiology which throughout human history has devoured hope, destroyed lives and, after a period of living death, sometimes relaxed its grip just long enough for the sufferer to summon the energy for a merciful suicide; now, at last, frequently curable by a combination of therapy and antidepressants.”
― Michael Bywater, Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did It Go?

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
― Albert Einstein

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
― Albert Einstein

“I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer suivi de Illuminations et autres textes

“My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“On the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths,
And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat:
Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet.
I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak,
I will have no thoughts: But infinite love will mount in my soul;
And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy,
through the countryside - as happy as if I were with a woman.

"Sensation”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn”
― Rimbaud

“But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.
He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“And you’ll miss me more as the narrowing weeks wing by. Someday duly, oneday truly, twosday newly, till whensday.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Three quarks for Muster Mark!”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuee! Nuee! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream . . . there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears . . . for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“We'll meet again, we'll part once more.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“over the bowls of memory where every hollow holds a hallow”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“When the moon of mourning is set and gone.
Over Glinaduna.
Lonu nula.
Ourselves, oursouls alone.
At the site of salvocean.
And watch would the letter you’re wanting be coming may be.
And cast ashore.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“..they were yung and easily freudened..”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude...”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain! Comeday morm and, O, you're vine! Sendday's eve and, ah you're vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you're going to be fined again!”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“But Noodynaady's actual ingrate tootle is of come into the garner mauve and thy nice are stores of morning and buy me a bunch of iodines. ”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“They lived and laughed and loved and left.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“First we feel. Then we fall.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Mass is not proportional to volume.
A girl as small as a violet. A girl who moves like a flower petal is pulling me toward her with more force than her mass.
Just then, like Newton’s apple, I rolled toward her without stopping until I fell on her, with a thump. With a thump.
My heart keeps bouncing between the sky and the ground.
It was my first love.”
― Kim In Yook, Physics of Love 사랑의 물리학

“The tremendous world I have in my head. But how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times better to be torn to pieces than to retain or bury it in me. That’s why I’m here, after all, that’s completely clear to me.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

“Indubitable in me is the greed for books. Not so much to own or to read them as to see them, to convince myself in a bookseller’s display of their continued existence. When there are several copies of the same book somewhere every single one gives me pleasure. It’s as if this greed came from my stomach, as if it were a misdirected appetite. Books I own give me less pleasure, whereas my sisters’ books do give me pleasure. The longing to own them is incomparably smaller, it’s almost absent.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka