Matthew Boylan

“And there, sir, lies the entire problem,
to have within oneself the inseparable
reality and the material clarity of feeling, to have it in such a degree that
the feeling cannot but express itself, to
have a wealth of words and of formal
constructions which can join in the
dance, serve one's purpose—and at the
very moment when the soul is about to
organize its wealth, its discoveries, this
revelation, at the unconscious moment
when the thing is about to emanate, a
higher and evil will attacks the soul like
vitriol, attacks the word and image mass,
attacks the mass of feeling and leaves me
panting at the very door of life.”
― Antonin Artaud, Collected Works: Volume One

“In everyday language it very frequently happens that the same word has different modes of signification — and so belongs to different symbols — or that two words that have different modes of signification are employed in propositions in what is superficially the same way. Thus the word 'is' figures as the copula, as a sign for identity, and as an expression for existence; 'exist' figures as an intransitive verb like 'go', and 'identical' as an adjective; we speak of something, but also of something's happening. (In the proposition, 'Green is green'— where the first word is the proper name of a person and the last an adjective — these words do not merely have different meanings: they are different symbols.)”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“It is not a matter of going ahead (—for then one is at best a herdsmen, i.e., the herds chief requirement), but of being able to go it alone, of being able to be different.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror when nothing stood between you and death? Have you questioned your eyes? And by looking into them, have you then understood that you cannot die? Your pupils dilated by conquered terror are more impenetrable than the Sphinx. From their glassy immobility a certitude, strangely tonic in its brief mysterious form, is born: you cannot die. It comes from the silence of our gaze meeting itself, the Egyptian calmness of a dream facing the terror of death. Each time the fear of death grabs you, look in the mirror. You will then understand why you can never die. Your eyes know everything. For in them there are specs of nothingness, which assure you that nothing more can happen.”
― Emil Cioran