poetryandthemuse

[poetryandthemuse]

[poetryandthemuse]

czeslaw milosz

She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

[poetryandthemuse]

[poetryandthemuse]

[poetryandthemuse]

[poetryandthemuse]

ivan turgenev

But what is there to tell of people who, though still alive, have withdrawn from the battlefield of life? They say, Lavretsky visited that remote convent where Lisa had hidden herself—that he saw her. Crossing over from choir to choir, she walked close past him, moving with the even, hurried, but meek walk of a nun; and she did not  glance at him; only the eyelashes on the side towards him quivered a little, only she bent her emaciated face lower, and the fingers of her clasped hands, entwined with her rosary, were pressed still closer to one another. What were they both thinking, what were they feeling? Who can know who can say? There are such moments in life, there are such feelings… One can but point to them—and pass them by.

[poetryandthemuse]

lee siegel

In the end, despite all your careful introspecting, you pay for following your instincts. And the more intensely and honestly you live, the more incessantly you pay. If you have become that particular, irreducible person, you get precisely what you want but no more. This is the unforgiving truth.

[poetryandthemuse]

douglas coupland

Rick, at what point did your luck turn? At what point did you switch from being a story to being a cautionary tale? People’s lives shouldn’t have a moral attached to them- they should be stories without morals, told purely for joy.

[poetryandthemuse]

leo tolstoy

To be an enthusiast had become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she did not feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the expectations of those who knew her. 

[poetryandthemuse]

ivan bunin

He walked to the far corner of the cemetery where all his relatives were buried—father, mother, the sister who had dies when a little girl. The inscriptions spoke touchingly and peacefully of rest, repose; of tenderness towards fathers, mothers, husbands and wives; of a love which, apparently, does not exist and never will exist on this earth; of that devotion to one another and submission to God, that fervent faith in a future life, that meeting once more in another and blessed land, in which one believes only here; and of that equality which death alone confers—of those moments when folk bestow the last kiss upon the lips of the dead beggar as on a brother’s, compare him with kings and prelates, say over him the loftiest and most solemn words.

[poetryandthemuse]

stanley kubrick

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism- and their assumption of immortality … The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent.

[poetryandthemuse]

clifford geertz

All I know is that, up until just a few years ago, I blithely, and perhaps a bit fatuously, used to tell students and younger colleagues who asked how to get ahead in our odd occupation that they should stay loose, take risks, resist the cleared path, avoid careerism, go their own way, and that if they did  so, if they kept at it and remained alert, optimistic, and loyal to the truth, my experience was that they could get away with murder, could do as they wish, have a valuable life, and nonetheless prosper. I don’t do that anymore.

[poetryandthemuse]

mario vargas llosa

Whether they want it or not, know it or not, when they invent stories, the writers of tales propagate dissatisfaction, demonstrating that the world is badly made and the life of fantasy richer than the life of our daily routine. This fact, if it takes root in their sensibility and consciousness, makes citizens more difficult to manipulate, less willing to accept the lies of the interrogators and jailers who would like to make them believe that behind bars they lead more secure and better lives.

[poetryandthemuse]

nick cave

I'd rather see what makes me different as something almost congenital. And I have these inklings that what you commit or endure in this world, relates to some kind of justice or balance. Maybe if you get a bad deal in this world, it is because of something you did, or were, in a previous life. 

[poetryandthemuse]

tom robbins

So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success.

[poetryandthemuse]

ray bradbury

I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'll be me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.

[poetryandthemuse]

thomas paine

  Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.