“Everything is in decline, and always has been...One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.“

—Emil Cioran

“The centuries have grown heavy and weigh upon the moment. We are more corrupt than all the ages, more decomposed than all the empires. Our exhaustion interprets history, our breathlessness makes us hear the death rattle of nations...the curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing, now, but masks and ghosts. . . "

~ Emil Cioran

“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals. ”

― Edward Abbey

Eyes. Those damn
eyes fucked me
forever.

—Charles Bukowski

“A wise man can do no better than to turn from the churches and look up through the airy majesty of the wayside trees with exultation, with resignation, at the unconquerable, unimplicated sun.”

― Llewelyn Powys

“And what is death but an emancipation from time?

That is of course only on condition that death really means death, not an entry into another consciousness or another sphere.

For Proust, the only real escape from life was into art and, through unexpected memory, into the golden moments of the past, always yielding a magic that is impossible in the present.

But for Beckett even art was not enough. He saw it as a trap to turn our eyes away from the realities of life and the true horror of our predicament: facing the horror was for him the only way to be really alive.”

— John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett

"Monotheistic religions themselves have, to a large extent, regressed into idolatry. Man projects his power of love and of reason unto God; he does not feel them any more as his own powers, and then he prays to God to give him back some of what he, man, has projected unto God...Every act of submissive worship is an act of alienation and idolatry."

~Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

“Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.”

—John Waters

Most of them speak what they
have been taught, not what
they have learned.

-- Bukowski

“So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.”

― Harry Crews

I hope to define my life, whatever is left,
by migrations, south and north with the birds
and far from the metallic fever of clocks,
the self staring at the clock saying, "I must do this."
I can't tell the time on the tongue of the river
in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment
of greenery, the dust off the canyon's rock walls,
the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.

-- Jim Harrison

“At night I dream that you and I
are two plants that grew together,
roots entwined.”

— Pablo Neruda