shams

“So you heroically undertook to endure the pains of faithlessness, just to be able to write good poems. But you didn´t realise then that when you lost that voice inside you, you´d end up all alone in an empty universe.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

“May I at least carry, to the boundless possibility contained in the abyss of everything, the glory of my disillusion like that of a great dream, and the splendor of not believing like a banner of defeat; a banner in feeble hands, but still and all a banner, dragged through mud and the blood of the weak but raised high for who knows what reason - whether in defiance, or as a challenge, or in mere desperation - as we vanish into quicksand. No one knows for what reason, because no one knows anything, and the sand swallows those with banners as it swallows those without. And the sand covers everything: my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“These verses believe; they love; they hope; that is all.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works

“I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge