“For truth be told, I was tormented by perceptions and their corollary temptation which from a social definition rendered me unsane, though from a more absolute viewpoint what I might be said to have been suffering from was an excess of insight.”
Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 14 (p. 177)
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Norman Spinrad 19
American science fiction writer and critic 1940Related quotes
Letter from Naples, Italy to Otto Grautoff (1896); as quoted in A Gorgon's Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann's Fiction (2005) by Lewis A. Lawson, p. 34
Context: I think of my suffering, of the problem of my suffering. What am I suffering from? From knowledge — is it going to destroy me? What am I suffering from? From sexuality — is it going to destroy me? How I hate it, this knowledge which forces even art to join it! How I hate it, this sensuality, which claims everything fine and good is its consequence and effect. Alas, it is the poison that lurks in everything fine and good! — How am I to free myself of knowledge? By religion? How am I to free myself of sexuality? By eating rice?
As quoted in Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do" by Peter McWilliams, from 2000 Years of Disbelief (1996) edited by James A Haught p. 817
“I am tormented by temptations."
"What kind? There is a cure for temptation."
"What?"
"Yielding to it.”
Je suis tourmenté par de mauvaises idées.
— En quel genre? Ça se guérit, les idées.
- Comment?
- En y succombant.
Part II.
Le Père Goriot (1835)
The Law of Mind (1892)
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: I went out on the street like an exile, I who am an everyday man, who resemble everybody else so much, too much. I went through the streets and crossed the squares with my eyes fixed upon things without seeing them. I was walking, but I seemed to be falling from dream to dream, from desire to desire. A door ajar, an open window gave me a pang. A woman passing by grazed against me, a woman who told me nothing of what she might have told me. I dreamed of her tragedy and of mine. She entered a house, she disappeared, she was dead.
“Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!”
Source: The Book of Disquiet
Source: 1960s, Management misinformation systems, 1967, p. 147.
Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 48
I Corinthians 9:22 (KJV)
First Epistle to the Corinthians
Context: Though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more. And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; To them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law. To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.