Emil Cioran
I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas have never caused anybody’s downfall. — Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair (University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition October 1, 1996) Originally published 1933.
Category: Essay
Chuck Palahniuk
That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect… You can’t control life, at least you can control your version. — Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger Than Fiction (Doubleday, 2004)
Annie Dillard
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. — Annie Dillard, from “Living Like Weasels,” Teaching a Stone to Talk (HarperCollins, New York, 2009, Kindle Edition)
John O’Donohue
The geography of your destiny is always clearer to the eye of your soul than to the intentions and needs of your surface mind. — John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong (Harper Perennial; Reprint edition, March 22, 2000)
Wallace Stevens
Dwelling always in an in-between realm, between eras of the imagination, there exists a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one. — Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, October 1, 1997)
Rainer Maria Rilke
And the loneliest people above all contribute most to commonality. I have said before that in this vast melody of life, some learn more, some less; therefore, in this big orchestra, everyone has his own role. The one who can perceive the entire melody is at the same time the loneliest and the closest to… Continue reading Rainer Maria Rilke
Wallace Stevens
The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar’s art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects… Continue reading Wallace Stevens
Virginia Woolf
What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home… Continue reading Virginia Woolf
Albert Camus
But there is in every man a profound instinct which is neither that of destruction nor that of creation. It is merely a matter of resembling nothing. — Albert Camus, The Minotaur (1939)
Alain de Botton
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon; First Edition, October 3, 2006)
The Vale of Soul-Making 