“Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.”
Ancient Evenings (1983) First lines
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Norman Mailer165
American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film m… 1923–2007Related quotes
Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman
Source: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
“Remember the pain?' thought Artemis. I hate myself. I really do.”
Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books
Source: The Time Paradox
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Austrian Romantic composer
Letter to Leopold Mozart (Mannheim, 2 February 1778), from The letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1769-1791, translated, from the collection of Ludwig Nohl, by Lady [Grace] Wallace (Oxford University Press, 1865, digitized 2006) vol. I, # 91 (p. 164) http://books.google.com/books?vid=0SGwLiCNxu7qZ5ch&id=KEgBAAAAQAAJ&printsec=titlepage&dq=%22The+letters+of+Wolfgang+Amadeus+Mozart,+1769-1791%22&hl=en#PRA1-PA164,M1
Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher
Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 309
Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Speech to the Peace Society (31 October 1935), quoted in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 332.
1935
Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) philosopher
Dialogues on Metaphysics (1688) Dialogue III
Context: I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I have sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am — of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain — or the mutual relations that obtain between all these things … I have no idea whatever of my soul.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Austrian Romantic composer
From a letter now regarded as a forgery by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz http://www.aproposmozart.com/Stafford%20--%20Mozart%20and%20genius.rev.ref.pdf, http://www.mozartforum.com/Lore/article.php?id=108, http://www.mozartforum.com/Lore/article.php?id=106 <br class="br">Misattributed <br class="br">Context: When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer — say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep — it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them.
Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter
Quote from De Kooning's lecture Trans/formation, at Studio 35, 1950.
1950's