The outlaws of poetry and the written word.
Florida
Joined October 2018
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“Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.”
― Aldous Huxley
'Those who love only the sweet are incapable of knowledge. Knowledge can bestow on us moments of joy and of highest elation, but the fruits of knowledge are bitter. In our world-aeon, knowledge means exile from Eden, the loss of...bliss'
—Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man
“There’s intoxication enough for me in just existing. Drunk on feeling, I drift but never stray…I’m just the same. But behind this sameness, I secretly scatter my personal firmament with stars and therein create my own infinity.”
— Fernando Pessoa
“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
― Aldous Huxley
“Gradually, as the universe took its present form, the weakening human imagination was slowly pushed down and contracted into its present helpless state. Yet gigantic energies still remain in men, imprisoned, but struggling to be free.”
—Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry
“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
- Albert Einstein
“The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.”
—Northrop Frye
"The world is absolutely out of control now and is not going to be saved by any reason or unreason."
--Robert Lowell
The legendary Beat writer Jack Kerouac died on this day, October 21st, 1969. Here’s a short write-up on his final days, along with one of my favorite Kerouac passages from his book – Big Sur. Check it out.
“By the time Jack Kerouac died at 47 in 1969, he’d exiled himself from the 1960s youth culture he’d partly inspired with the likes of ‘On the Road’ and ‘The Dharma Bums.’
Bloated by booze and reactionary politics, he bore little resemblance to that matinee-idol handsome ‘King of the Beats’. In death, though, Kerouac’s star has risen with each succeeding generation.”
“A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.”
- Albert Einstein
No, I am not ashamed to repeat that from my comrades of the gutter I learned more, gained a greater appreciation of literature, than ever I did from the pedagogues who clutter our halls of learning.
School never provided us with an open forum where we could discuss passionately and freely the books and authors we found to our liking. It all serves to remind me of our so-called democratic system of voting.
We vote only for the figures who are nominated—men who, need I say, are scarcely the sort an intelligent person would like to see in office.
-- Henry Miller
"The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources."
--Nelson Algren
“Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.”
—Cesare Pavese
“When I got to the street, I walked boldly. But I was always accompanied by an agonizing thought: the fear that honest people may be thieves who have chosen a cleverer and safer way of stealing.”
― Jean Genet
“There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue; my heart aches from the consciousness that I am working for money, and money is the centre of all I do.”
—Anton Chekhov
“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."
― Patti Smith
"I know, I know, it is not Paris alone that suffers today; the rest of Europe as well for decades to come will not be what it was before the First World War.
A certain shadow has never quite disappeared from Europe’s once so bright horizon. Bitterness and distrust of nation for nation and people for people remained like an insidious poison in its maimed body.
In spite of the social and technical progress of this quarter of a century between world war and world war, there is not a single nation in our small world of the West that has not lost immeasurably much of its joie de vivre and its carefree existence."
-- Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
