"Had Noah possessed the gift of foreseeing the future, there is not a doubt in the world he would have scuttled the ark."

-- Emil Cioran

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”

― Joseph Heller

“Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman . . . Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him.”

—Jean Baudrillard, America

Not knowing when
the dawn will come
I open every
door.

—Emily Dickinson

“And so I go to the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place. I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces....I am less important than I thought. I rejoice in that.”

—Wendell Berry

"You're against everything that's been done since the last war," said the very up-to-date lady.

"You've got the wrong date: I'm against everything that's been done since Adam."

-- Emil Cioran

The purpose of art is to lay bare
the questions that have been
hidden by the answers.

—James Baldwin

“In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood…

Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.”

— Edward Abbey

“Let us leave modern men to their ‘truths’ and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.”

- Julius Evola

“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”

—Ernest Hemingway

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

-- Simone Weil

"Man is a strange, inauthentic creature who has very little contact with real Existence. Intellectuals cut themselves off from reality by trapping themselves in a world of concepts; ordinary men are cut off from reality because they are so self-absorbed, so involved in the pettiness of everyday existence. They live in a meaningless world because they find it so difficult to mean anything."

-- Colin Wilson

"We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should."

~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”

― William Faulkner

"The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men. And then the sacred "will of the people" becomes blinder, baser, colder and more dangerous than the will of any tyrant.

When the will of the people becomes the sum of the weakness of a multitude of weak men, it is time to make a break.

So today. Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bringing the evil into being."

-- D.H. Lawrence

“Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.”

― Frank Lloyd Wright

“The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.”

—Hunter S. Thompson

"I'd tell them to have an unhappy love
affair, hemorrhoids, bad teeth
and to drink cheap wine,
avoid opera and golf and chess,
to keep switching the head of their
bed from wall to wall
and then I'd tell them to have
another unhappy love affair
and never to use a silk typewriter
ribbon,
avoid family picnics
or being photographed in a rose
garden;
read Hemingway only once,
skip Faulkner
ignore Gogol
stare at photographs of Gertrude Stein
and read Sherwood Anderson in bed
while eating Ritz crackers,
realize that people who keep
talking about sexual liberation
are more frightened than you are..."

-- Charles Bukowski

“Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will-power.”

—La Rochefoucauld

"For some reason, it was the fate of America not to become itself, not to build its house upon the foundation of a loss for which no recovery was possible. Its fate, rather, was to sacrifice its freedom to nationhood, to reiterate and exasperate the rage for possession, and to fall into the watery mire of what is not life.

Instead of a nation of poets, it became a nation of debtors, property owners, shopkeepers, spectators, gossipers, traffickers in rumor, prejudice, and information-capitalists who, in their strange uncertainty about life, pursue the delusions of recovery in their appropriation of everything."

-- Robert Pogue Harrison

“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”

― Michel Houellebecq