“Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.”

—Jim Morrison

"The chances are that during this transition period of global wars, lasting perhaps a century or two, art will become less and less important.

A world torn by indescribable upheavals, a world preoccupied with social and political transformations, will have less time and energy to spare for the creation and appreciation of works of art."

-- Henry Miller

“It’s not so much
that nothing means
anything but more that it keeps meaning
nothing.
there’s no release,
just gurus and self-
appointed gods and hucksters.
the more people say,
the less there is to say.
even the best books
are dry sawdust.”

—Charles Bukowski

"I am a distinguished outcast in American letters — a renegade and recalcitrant, hated and feared by all cliques and snoring phantom celebrities, from ultra-radical to ultra-conservative — an isolated wanderer in the realm of intellect and lithely fantastic emotion, hemmed in by gnawing hostilities and blandly simulating venoms."

-- Maxwell Bodenheim

"The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him."

— Schopenhauer

“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”

― John Berger

“The problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more.”

~ Charles Bowden

"the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them."

--Bukowski

"Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."

—Nikola Tesla

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”

― T.S. Eliot

Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.

—Tom Robbins

“I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead.

I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does.

I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it?

I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.”

—James Salter

“We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary."

--Terence McKenna

“Our revolt is as ill conceived as the world which provokes it.”

— Emil Cioran

“However, the truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul.”

— Thomas Merton

“To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame. I have no message of hope to deliver. For the West, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what's more, we continue to export it.”

—Michel Houellebecq

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

-- W.B. Yeats

“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them.

Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

—Aldous Huxley

“Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.”

― Erich Fromm