That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.
Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.
Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep. We don't know how to let go. We're like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we struggle the harder it is to get back in the box.
But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.
The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.
The only law which is really lived up to wholeheartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity.
Paint what you like and die happy
I'm delirious because I'm dying so fast.
The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.
The piano bar is the gateway to the halls of masturbation.
Life's wildest moment---she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies.
We are swimming on the face of time and all else has drowned, is drowning, or will drown.
When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.
I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection.
I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.
I wanted to die; I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for.
I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions.
I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must writer and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you.
Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself with it, is suicidal.
Develop an Interest in Life as you see it.
I have found God, but he is insufficient.
We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
I had to learn to think, feel, and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink.
All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape.
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