Matthew Boylan

“It is the madman in us who forces us into adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

“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

“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“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