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“Doubt is more intelligent than poetry, insofar as it tells malicious tales about the world, things we’ve long known but struggled to hide from ourselves. But poetry surpasses doubt, pointing to what we cannot know. Doubt is narcissistic; we look at everything critically, including ourselves, and perhaps that comforts us. Poetry, on the other hand, trusts the world, and rips us from the deep-sea diving suits of our “I”; it believes in the possibility of beauty and its tragedy. Poetry’s argument with doubt has nothing in common with the facile quarrel of optimism and pessimism. The twentieth century’s great drama means that we now deal with two kinds of intellect: the resigned and the seeking, the questing. Doubt is poetry for the resigned. Whereas poetry is searching, endless wandering. Doubt is a tunnel, poetry is a spiral. Doubt prefers to shut, while poetry opens. Poetry laughs and cries, doubt ironizes. Doubt is death’s plenipotentiary, its longest and wittiest shadow; poetry runs toward an unknown goal. Why does one choose poetry while another chooses doubt? We don’t know and we’ll never find out. We don’t know why one is Cioran and the other is Milosz.”
― A Defense of Ardor: Essays
― A Defense of Ardor: Essays
“A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.”
― ABC of Reading
― ABC of Reading
“Idle living turns me into an idiot. I can’t afford to get stupid. I’ve already been irritating. I’ve used up my passes on personality flaws.”
― Goodbye, Mr. Nothing
― Goodbye, Mr. Nothing
“The city was filled to overflowing with persons who had neither brains nor individuality, who bore no resemblance to men that live by bread, and had only their outward shape to distinguish them from sheep.”
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“We learn much by tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better.”
― The Wright Brothers
― The Wright Brothers
Horror Illusion
— 247 members
— last activity Oct 30, 2019 08:18AM
Do you love what lurks in the shadows, the darkness, the gloomy colours? Do you love being scared and frightened, screaming in unison as a great book ...more
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