"To blame it on your mum and dad
And claim that it’s their fault what you do
Takes quite a nerve as though you had
No part to play in what makes you
This fucked up childhood myth’s a line
That everyone’s at some time used;
It may explain why you’re a swine
But not why you should be excused"
- “Footnote to Larkin” by Harry Ricketts
0
"If you don’t have a dream, then you can’t have a dream come true."
- Nancy Wilson, “Happy Talk”
2
"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."
- The Beatles, Abbey Road
1
"The divine will is an abyss of which the present moment is the entrance. Plunge fearlessly therein, and you will find your heart’s desire."
- Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity
2
"The courtesan bent over him and looked long at his face, into his eyes that had grown tired.
“You are the best lover that I have had,” she said thoughtfully. “You are stronger than others, more supple, more willing. You have learned my art well, Siddhartha. Some day, when I am older, I will have a child by you. And yet, my dear, you have remained a Samana. You do not really love me — you love nobody. Is that not true?”
“Maybe,” said Siddhartha wearily. “I am like you. You cannot love either, otherwise how could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can — that is their secret."
- Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
3
"He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process. To reassert its validity and strength, he thought, one need only act, without fear of punishment and without hope of reward: act from the center of one’s soul."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
3
"The most commonly reigning form of barbarism: not realizing that morality is a matter of taste."
- Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle
4
"I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed. Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too confused and chaotic; scarcely can I perceive the neutral glow into which the elusive whirling medley of stirred-up colours is fused, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invit it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate for me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste, cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, from what period of my past life."
- Marcel Proust on memory and madeleines, from Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1 (À la recherche des temps perdus)
2
"Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentation, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter 3, Letters to a Young Poet
3
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