"There's beauty and poetry everywhere, still, in this fabricated, war-torn world we've created for ourselves. If you have the eyes to see through the reductive facade and beyond the machine, you come to realize, as Keats did, that the poetry of the earth is never dead. Despite it all."
-- Erik Rittenberry

“We are an exceptional model of the human race.

We no longer know how to produce food.

We no longer can heal ourselves.

We no longer raise our young.
We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon.

We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us.
We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived.

But when the lights are off we are helpless.

We cannot move without traffic signals.

We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby.

We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life.

And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life.

We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand.

We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us.”

— Charles Bowden

“…every innovator, every individual with a fresh vision or a larger vision of life, automatically destroys the existent moral code—in favor of spirit. But his disciples soon establish a new moral code, one just as rigid as the preceding one, forgetting that the spirit will again break the vessel which contains it.”

~ Henry Miller

“You desire to live 'according to nature'? Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud of words! ... while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders!" 

— Nietzsche

"A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better. What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes?"

~ Hunter S. Thompson

“Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.”

--Chuck Palahniuk

“Everything is your fault if you're any damn good.”

—Ernest Hemingway

“Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.”

—Lionel Trilling

“Today, everyone wants to be someone, loud; everyone wants to be authentic, be different to other—thus everyone is like everyone else. I miss the nameless.”

--Byung-Chul Han

"Throughout all of history and pre-history it has been accepted that there is something wrong with the human animal.

Health may be the natural condition of other species, but in humans it is sickness that is normal.

To be chronically unwell is part of what it means to be human. It is no accident that every culture has its own versions of therapy. Tribal shamans and modern psychotherapists answer the same needs and practice the same trade."

--John Gray, The Silence of Animals

“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”

― Boris Pasternak

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there..."

-- Jack Kerouac
📸 Erik Rittenberry

"There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't."

~ William Faulkner

"To awaken means to realize one's nothingness, that is, to realize one's complete and absolute mechanicalness, and one's complete and absolute helplessness... So long as a man is not horrified at himself, he knows nothing about himself."

-- Gurdjieff

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

~ Eric Hoffer

"Now I wander among the ruins; I am lawless, full of hesitations, alone, and by accepting this, I have surrendered to my singularity and my flaws. After having lived my entire life in a sort of lie, I must create a truth."

—Albert Camus

"To ticket a doctrine with the label of pessimism is not to impugn its validity, and the so-called optimists are not the most efficient in action. I believe, on the contrary, that many of the greatest heroes, perhaps the greatest of all, have been men of despair and that by despair they have accomplished their mighty works."

--Miguel de Unamuno

"Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life."

~ Hermann Hesse

“I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next."

— Emil Cioran

“Like everyone else who hasn’t been reduced to moronism by our commercial Boy Scout ethic, I like my friends, dislike my enemies and regard strangers with a tolerant indifference.”

— Edward Abbey

“If civilization is ever going to be anything but a grandiose pratfall, anything more than a can of deodorizer in the shithouse of existence, the people are going to have to concern themselves with magic and poetry.”

— Tom Robbins