Famous Quotes Ipsum

It's kind of fun to do the impossible. it's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. i don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. i wish i believed, as j. b. priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! a "bad night" is not always a bad thing. the body of b. franklin, / printer, / like the cover of an old book, / its contents torn out / and / stripped of its lettering and gilding, / lies here / food for worms, / but the work shall not be lost, / for it will, as he believed / appear once more / in a new and more elegant edition / revised and corrected / by the author. all humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual. the form of government most suitable to the artist is no government at all. the flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all. the sky was that deep sunday blue going black, just on the cusp of color seeping into empty space. a life of self-indulgence, if led with a whole heart, may also bring a certain wisdom. tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice..

She thought now of the pink anemones waving in that water. like herself, when he'd first spied on her with her sensitive, fleshy tentacles of thought waving all around her, until he'd touched and made her draw up quickly into a stony fist. but he knew just how to touch her, speak to her, breathe on her, to draw her out again. physical pleasure was such a convincing illusion, and sex, the ultimate charade of safety. i have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws ere i'll weep. too often we get scared. scared of what we might not be able to do. scared of what people might think if we tried. we let fears stand in the way of our hopes. we say no when we want to say yes. we sit quietly when we want to scream. and we shout with the others when we should keep our mouths shut. why? after all, we do only go around once. there's really no time to be afraid. just do it. these things seem small and indistinguishable, like far-off mountains turned into clouds..

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy. i don't want my hair cut! i don't want my eyebrows up or down. i want them right where they are! i'm leaving now, and if anyone so much as makes a move to stop me, there'll be plenty of hair cut and it won't be mine! now, what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained. a book is a present you can open again and again. poetry does not necessarily have to be beautiful to stick in the depths of our memory. metaphors are not to be trifled with. a single metaphor can give birth to love. hell has no fury like women's fury. sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. a day is a miniature eternity. drop the question what tomorrow may bring, and count as profit every day that fate allows you. that's the way things come clear. all of a sudden. and then you realize how obvious they've been all along. early in the novel that tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit tomas, anna meets vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. at the end of the novel, anna throws herself under a train. this symmetrical composition - the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end - may seem quite 'novelistic' to you, and i am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as 'fictive', 'fabricated', and 'untrue to life' into the word 'novelistic'. because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. they are composed like music. guided by his sense of beauty, and individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. anna could have chosen another way to take her life. but the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life. for tomorrow may rain, so i'll follow the sun. interesting that the beliefs of others are labeled mere superstitions, mr. todd. ours we call religion. one can go on living when one is intoxicated by life. unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. we shall not cease from exploration - and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started - and know the place for the first time. my piano is a universe. those eighty-eight keys arrange the seven planets in musical scales, an aural cosmos. if we could stay that way forever; if we could stay filled to the brim and floating toward the darkness, never suffocating or dying - . all sanity is great madness, but the greatest madness of all is to live life the way it is, rather than as it should be. i must pack my short life full of interesting events and creative activity. philosophy and aesthetic contemplation are not enough. i intend to do everything possible to broaden my experiences and allow myself to reach the fullest development..