“I really was never any more than what I was — a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.”

~ Bob Dylan

“Surrounded by hordes of people, busy with all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world – such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too risky to be himself, far easier and

'We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.'

~ Jeff Buckley

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

-- Galway Kinnell
(full poem below)

poeticoutlaws.substack.com/p/another-nigh…

“For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves!”

— Nietzsche

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”

—Roberto Bolano

“We cried on a cold and frosty morn
We cried because our souls were torn
So much for tears
So much for these long
and wasted years.'

— Bob Dylan

“Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.”

~ Erich Fromm

“...a society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven...”

~ James Baldwin

Everything around me is evaporating.
My whole life,
my memories,
my imagination...
But I have in me
all the dreams in the world.

—Fernando Pessoa

“Don't touch my dick, don't touch my knife.”

—Anthony Bourdain

“Life is complicated. It’s filled with nuance. It’s unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt. The root cause of all life’s problems is looking for a simple fucking answer.”

—Anthony Bourdain

“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”

— Oscar Wilde

“I demand unconditional love and complete freedom. That is why I am terrible.”

— Tomaz Salamun

Buddhists say everything is led by mind.
My doubts are healed by drinking
a bottle of red wine in thirty-three minutes.

~ Jim Harrison

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

—Aldous Huxley

'Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.'

— Hannah Arendt

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”

—Joyce Carol Oates

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

― Fyodor