“Some words were like that. Whole lives attached to them. Ghosts and lives and ecstasy and sorrow.”
Source: The Bronze Horseman
“Some words were like that. Whole lives attached to them. Ghosts and lives and ecstasy and sorrow.”
Source: The Bronze Horseman
YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VIPZ3dHD4Y&feature=player_embedded
"Introduction," p. xxii
The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986)
Context: While young fools of my generation produced terrifying symptoms by ingesting poisons of various synthetic kinds, I was taken to extraordinary realms by a bacillus carried from human excrement by a fly's foot. I swelled to the size of a mountain and shrank to the size of a pin, flew and sang and fell through exotic configurations, in the intervals between agonizing convulsions on the heavy earthenware vaso, whose lethal contents I had to dispose of in the fields when the fever subsided. When the burning and shivering stopped and I could see again only what was there, I stayed enthralled by clarity. There was nothing to me in biochemical mindbending or bullshit psychedelia that did not have the slimy scent of death about it. I hated being out of touch, isolated by the solipsism of delirium, unable to communicate or comprehend.
As quoted in "Seal" profile at Victoria's Secret Fashion Show (CBS) (4 December 2007)
Context: Myself and the people close to me are all part of a social system, and we were being conditioned to accept the status quo. But on this album, I'm saying it's time for us to take charge. We can change it. We can take control of our emotional system and be happy. My point is don't just sit there and allow life to happen to you. Go out and take charge if you want change, but it begins closer to home.
“Ecstasy is the moment of exaltation from wholeness!”
September 10, 1936
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Reflections on a chestnut tree root.
Nausea (1938)
Context: Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.