brian annan

“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

“We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known. If we call death a sleep, it’s because it seems like sleep on the outside; if we call death a new life, it’s because it seems like something different from life. With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make believe they’re happy.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“This book has been written against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“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