Undercurrents by Michael Fragstein
Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate… but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.
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| — | The Diaries of Franz Kafka, entry from October 19, 1921 by Franz Kafka (via infinitesplinters) |
And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.
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| — | By Haruki Murakami (via whatokay) |
When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.
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| — | By Emil Cioran (via substantia-nigra) |
From Hiroshima mon amour (1959) directed by Alain Resnais, screenplay by Marguerite Duras (via darknessiseaseful)
That’s what a house is: a pile of stuff with a cover on it…a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.
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| — | From Comic Relief (1986) by George Carlin |
My advice to all those who are going to find themselves is: stay exactly where you are. Otherwise you are in great danger of losing yourself for ever.
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| — | From The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder |
Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact… As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is something very pleasant, too, to smash things.
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| — | From Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via sunrec) |
And I was tormented by the thought that I might not have time to accomplish my task. What task? I had no idea. Frankly, was what I was doing worth continuing?
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| — | From The Fall by Albert Camus (via demise-of-sanity) |
I said to myself: Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; it is gone so quickly and how empty I am once it has left me. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life?
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| — | From Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by LLoyd Alexander (via demise-of-sanity) |
My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists.
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| — | By Jean Rostand (via magratheaa) |
The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist everyday, he is a victim of the “meaning” of life.
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| — | From All Gall Is Divided by Emil Cioran (via damnfinecupoftea) |
