Through Quotes (page 214)
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He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments? negative affections. In this nihilist fin de sicle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It's your sadness, idiot, he'd say.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, -- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!
Mark Twain
Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?
But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found — I wander through the ruin of S
Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)
And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory.
James Merrill
While leaning over the toilet getting up his nerve, he thought that the moment before making yourself throw up must be very like the instant before suicide. You are almost content to bear the sickening headache and the torment in your stomach rather than go through that moment. But the prospect of relief made you foolhardy and you jammed your finger down your throat.
John Clellon Holmes
He is no longer the pretext for a story: the story itself renders him homage. The works of Fantomas can neither be destroyed nor accept modifications. ...Fantomas requires more of others than of himself ... He is never completely invisible. His likeness can be seen through his face. ... Fantomas's science is more precious than the word. It is not possible to guess it - and no one can doubt its power.
Rene Magritte
I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my paths led. And through the air, I am he that walks unseen.I am the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the lucky number.I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water. I came from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me.I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Poetry is cathartic only for the unserious, for in front of the rush of expressive need stands the barrier of form, and when the hurdler's scissored legs and outstretched arms carry him over the bars, the limp in his life, the headache in his heart, the emptiness he's full of, are as absent as his street-shoes, which will pinch and scrape his feet in all the old leathery ways once the race is over and he has to walk through the front door of his future like a brushman with some feckless...
William Gass