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"Our imagination flies;
we are its shadow on the earth."
- Vladimir Nabokov



"Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? "
- Annie Dillard
"The Writing Life"



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we speak because the world speaks

"We have lived too long within a world of our own making. We have lived too long within a language of the merely human.
To keep our internals open we have to learn to read and write ourselves out of ourselves, and uncurl ourselves back into the world. Language is not a tool for communication that belongs to us. Language is not an exclusively human ability at all. It is a field of meanings and intentions that we inhabit. Human language grows out of the world itself. We speak because the world speaks. And because language and the symbols upon which it depends are the Breath of God, it has the power to penetrate to the very heart of things. Language in the broadest sense is creative because the world was spoken into being. Because of this, reading can be a means of transformation, of gnosis. The reading of the world that we need to learn has to be active and engaged. It must take the form of a dialogue that begins with a careful listening to the voices that speak to us from beyond the bounds of the known. We have to engage in a gentle kind of call and response, a reading that calls in turn for speech, and perhaps for writing, or other kinds of making, and that always turns back to listening."
- David Abram

What We Know
- an illustrated exploration of what we have learnt about our predicament after 2500 years of philosophical thought.

ziff - n. A nasty philosophical dispute. "I had a ziff with him once in the journals."
The Philosophical Lexicon

random thoughts

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3.29.2002  

 

:: an artist is a creature driven by demons

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art."
- William Faulkner

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3.28.2002  

 

shadow and light

"In a movie theater, you look at the screen, you never look at the back. The projector is in the back. The film is not really on the screen, it is just a projection of shadow and light. The film exists in the projector, in the back, but you never look at that. Your mind is at the back of everything. Your mind is the projector. But you always look at the screen - at the everything.

When you're in love, the person is beautiful. When you hate, the person is ugly. You never become aware of how the same person can be beautiful and ugly.

The only way to reach the truth is to learn how to be immediate in your vision. The mind is the problem, because the mind projects its images on the screen you're looking at. What you see is just your projection. And there are as many worlds as there are minds, because every mind lives in his own world.

We get caught up in projecting movies of our own making onto the situations and people surrounding us. Instead of taking responsibility for our own expectations, desires and judgments, we attribute them to others. A projection can be good or bad, beautiful or ugly, disturbing or comforting, but it is still a projection that prevents us from seeing reality as it is. The only way out is to recognize the game."
- Osho

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3.27.2002  

 

Advise for aspiring writers

"Advice? I don't have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you're writing, you're a writer. Write like you're a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there's no chance for a pardon. Write like you're clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you've got just one last thing to say, like you're a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God's sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don't. Who knows, maybe you're one of the lucky ones who doesn't have to."
- Alan Watts


"Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.' A glib saying.
When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, not let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"
- C.S. Lewis

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3.26.2002  

 

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our own frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
- H.P. Lovecraft

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3.25.2002  
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downstream

"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors . . . Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . .
Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death?"
~Jorge Luis Borges






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