Timo

“One night, I sat Beauty on my knee. —And I found her bitter. —And I hurt her.
I took arms against justice.
I fled, entrusting my treasure to you, o witches, o misery, o hate.
I snuffed any hint of human hope from my consciousness. I made the muffled leap of a wild beast onto any hint of joy, to strangle it.
Dying, I called out to my executioners so I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called plagues to suffocate me with sand, blood. Misfortune was my god. I wallowed in the mud. I withered in criminal air. And I even tricked madness more than once.
And spring gave me an idiot’s unbearable laughter.
Just now, having nearly reached death’s door, I even considered seeking the key to the old feast, through which, perhaps, I might regain my appetite.
[...] “A hyena you’ll remain, etc.… ” cries the demon that crowns me with merry poppies. “Make for death with every appetite intact, with your egotism, and every capital sin.”
Ah. It seems I have too many already: —But, dear Satan, I beg you not to look at me that way, and while you await a few belated cowardices—you who so appreciate a writer’s inability to describe or inform—I’ll tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell & Illuminations

“Escape from Freedom attempts to show, modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

- Rain”
― Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems