Derek

Derek’s Bookshelves

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“Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, real hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, everyone does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

tags: suffering

27 likes

“Every angel is terrifying.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

tags: angels, elegy, poetry

347 likes

“The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

tags: absurd, life, philosophy, science

281 likes

“In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.”
― Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar

127 likes

“nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal;nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening, innocent spontaneous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted; brain over heart, surface:nowhere hating or to fear;shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence; never to rest and never to have:only to grow.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”
― E. E. Cummings

287 likes

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