Michael Davison

“I was, at the end of the day, a slow learner, an extremely slow learner afflicted with the lack of self-awareness to even realize it. I always thought I knew it all, but I was only ever motivated into action by one of two things: pleasure or pain.”
― Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

“On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.”
― Edward Thomas

“But what I want to say is this: this will happen to everybody at some point - a deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a persons, life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation, or someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into one million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realized, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live, really – to die in a way, and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex re-ordering of ourselves.”
― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage