Mad Girl's Love Song

Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…”
“It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.

LE PETIT PRINCE, ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPERY

Action is transitory - a step, a blow

The motion of a muscle - this way or that -

'tis done and in the aftervacancy

We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed;

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,

And shares the nature of infinity

--William Wordsworth, 'The Borderers'

"Such a head! - Would to heaven! my enemies only saw the inside of it!"

--Laurence Sterne, 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy'

"but let us be merry and give our minds to pleasure,

for a man may be sad whenever he wishes"

--'Gawain and the Green Knight'

"For it is really too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, where one false move may force us to resign the game, but with the difference that we can start no second game, no return-match."

Freud, 'Thoughts for the Times on War and Death'

Listen to the newborn infant's cry in the hour of birth - see the death struggles in the final hour - and then declare whether what begins and ends in this way can be intended to be enjoyment.

What is reflection? Simply to reflect on these two questions: How did I get into this and this and how do I get out of it again, how does it end?

Kierkegaard, quoted by Al Alvarez, 'The Savage God'

e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle

"I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be something interesting. It's disgusting".

--J.D. Salinger, 'Franny and Zooey'

"Lets just try and have a marvellous time this weekend. I mean try not to analyse everything to death, for once. Especially me. I love you".

--J.D. Salinger, 'Franny and Zooey'

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.

--RAY BRADBURY, 'Dandelion wine'

boot

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting"

--Paolo Coehlo, 'The Alchemist'

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

--Ernest Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon'

"Considerate la vostra semenza

Fatti non foste a viver come bruti

Ma per seguir virtute e canonscenza"

--[Ulysses] Dante Aligheri, 'Inferno'

And i couldn't see the road for the cars or the sky for the stars

--Christiana Spens, 'The Wrecking Ball'

Poetry is a game of loser-takes-all

--Ferdinand/'Pierrot', 'Pierrot le Fou'

Idealization is very moving; it is also very false. It allows profound self-deceptions, at both the individual and the social level. Literature does not make us better, it does not make us worse; the study of it does not make us better, it does not make us worse. It only confirms what we are already.

--Harold Bloom, in conversation with Imre Salunsinsky

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.

CHILDREN OF THE MIND, ORSON SCOTT CARD

If you don’t want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You’re taking up space, air.

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS, DAVE EGGERS

"The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something".

--Nick Hornby, 'A Long Way Down'

"Drink and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die (but alas we never do!)"

--Dorothy Parker

I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

FEAR OF FLYING, ERICA JONG

You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.

MIDDLEMARCH, GEORGE ELIOT

'When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves'

--Chuck Palhunik, 'Invisible Monsters'

Yesterday you asked me what the purpose of life is. I’ve thought about that ever since. I think it’s to do good no matter what life throws at you, to not let the pain turn you bitter.

JUST ONE WISH, JANETTE RALLISON

'Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live'.

--Alexandre Dumas, 'The Count of Monte Cristo'

When in his heightened melancholia, he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind.

--Freud, 'Mourning and Melancholia'

words, words, etc

"Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart..."

-Troilus, 'Troilus and Cressida'

Too bright for me, darkens descends
Oh well I'm not well again and once more darkness it descends
The ground is falling under me
And I cant find the means to leave

--Laura Marling, 'Darkness Descends'

its funny how the first chords that you come to
are the minor notes that come to serenade you
it's hard to accept yourself as someone
you don't desire
as someone you don't want to be

--Laura Marling, 'Rambling Man'

At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - the outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.

-- Kate Chopin, 'The Awakening'

)))))

I’m the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant.

--Elizabeth Wurtzel, 'Prozac Nation'

paralysis

Sometimes I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

-- Evelyn Waugh, 'Brideshead Revisited'

isn't it... don't you think?

The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. She worries that the process of socialisation which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion of wrongness.

--Richard Rorty, 'Contingency, Irony and Solidarity'

just too good

He who has a contempt for [poetry] cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

*

Many people suppose poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables, with like endings; but wherever there is a sense of beauty or power or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower, that 'spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun' -- there is poetry, in its birth.

*

Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is that fine particle within us that expands, refines, rarefies, raises our whole being; without it, 'man's life is poor as beasts'.

*

The child is a poet, in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-Killer; the shepherd boy is a poet when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice when he gazes after the Lord Mayor's show; the miser when he hugs his gold; the courtier who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who fancies himself a god- the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all others think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness at second-hand.

*

Homer has celebrated the anger of Achilles: but was not the hero as mad as the poet? Plato banished the poets from his Commonwealth, lest their description of the natural man should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without passions and affections, who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow or anger, to be cast down nor elated by anything. This was a chimera, however, which never existed but in the brain of the inventor; and Homer's poetical world has outlived Plato's philosophical Republic.

*

The light of poetry is not only a direct, but a reflected light, that while it shews us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals to us with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of our thought, and penetrates our whole being.

*

Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed.

*

The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself, that it impatient of all limit, that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur...

*

It is not... the difference between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty. Children are satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose...

*

We are as fond of indulging our violent passions as of reading a description of those of others... The sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or beauty. It is natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration.

--William Hazlitt, 'On Poetry in General'

"To discover the fundamental problem common to mankind I must ask myself what my fundamental problem is [...] A work of art is the expression of an incommunicable reality that one tries to communicate ... That is its paradox and its truth".

--Ionesco.

abracadabra

Words and Magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power. By words one of us can give to another the greatest happiness or bring about utter despair.

--Freud, 'Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis'

The most powerful thing in the poet, which blows the good and evil spirit into his works, is precisely the unconscious. So a great one, like Shakespeare, will enfold and present jewels which he could no more see than he could his own heart in his own body… If one dares to say anything about the unconscious and unfathomable, then one can only seek to determine its existence, not its depths.

--Jean Paul Richter

How excellent, that it is so, and that the deepest depths of our soul are hidden in the night! Our poor thinking organ would certainly not be able to seize every stimulus, the seed of every sensation, in its ultimate elements, or to hear aloud such a soaring ocean of dark waves, without shuddering with anxiety and in fear and cowardice letting the rudder go from its hands.

JG van Herder

sale

We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.

--Nieztsche, 'Daybreak'

sunset, according to Dr Johnson

"the gentle coruscations of declining day"

When we examine our own lives, we have so many obstacles to correct vision, so many motives to blindness. The 'vulgar heat' of jealousy and personal interest comes between us and the loving perception of each particular. A novel, just because it is not our own life, places us in a moral position that is favourable for perception and shows us what it would be like to take up that position in life.