Gary

“Still others prefer the idea that the design reflects the same sort of syncretic instincts that led the makers to transform the Christian lion into a Scandinavian horse and the Christian snake into the world-encircling Midgard serpent of Æsir mythology, offering familiarity as an enticement to acceptance in much the same way as designers of the first railway carriages in the nineteenth century deliberately designed them to look like horse-drawn wagons so that people would dare to step on board.”
― Robert Ferguson, Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North

“FRANK BIDART Song of the Mortar and Pestle The desire to approach obliteration preexists each metaphysic justifying it. Watch him fucked want to get fucked hard. Christianity allowed the flagellants light, for even Jesus found release from flesh requires mortification of the flesh. From the ends of the earth the song is, Grind me into dust.”
― Stephen Burt, The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them

“To be free, above all, was to be free from enslavement to one’s own basest desires, which could never be fulfilled, and the pursuit of which could only foster ceaseless craving and discontent.”
― Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed

“Kierkegaard’s most remarkable and subtle observations, that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards. I think it means you have to turn around and start walking backwards, facing the past, if the present is going to make any sense at all.”
― Robert Ferguson, Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North