brian annan

“everything I live, all of it equally condemned to change*… Landscapes are repetitions. On a simple train ride I uselessly and restlessly waver between my inattention to the landscape and my inattention to the book that would amuse me if I were someone else. Life makes me feel a vague nausea, and any kind of movement aggravates it. Only landscapes that don’t exist and books I’ll never read aren’t tedious. Life, for me, is a drowsiness that never reaches the brain. This I keep free, so that I can be sad there.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Only a simple black pencil will do for making a notation of a benchmark. Ink will run, be dissolved by the tree sap, be washed away by rain, dew, fog, and snow. Nothing as artificial as ink will do for recording eternity and immortality. Graphite is carbon that has been subjected to enormous pressure for millions of years and that might have become coal or diamonds. Instead, however, it has been transformed into something more precious than a diamond; it has become a pencil that can record all that it has seen… A pencil is a greater miracle than a diamond, although the chemical make-up of graphite and diamond is identical.”
― Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales

“But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which makes its own form. If I may not find its secret within myself, I shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it will never come to me.”
― Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

“Publishers, theatrical managers, and critics ask not for the quality inherent in creative art, but will it meet with a good sale, will it suit the palate of the people? Alas, this palate is like a dumping ground; it relishes anything that needs no mental mastication. As a result, the mediocre, the ordinary, the commonplace represents the chief literary output.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays