#chaos

[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews? ↗

— Iain Pears

#civilization #decay #end-of-the-world #genocide #god-s-wrath

[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion. ↗

— Clive Barker

#horror #illusion #oblivion #reality #truth

Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control. ↗

— Terence McKenna

#control #ego #control

I want us to enter into the laughter of the God that is before, during and after the experience of being human, to swim in grace, to revel in messiness, to find joy in the suffering and love in the chaos. ↗

— Tobin Wilson

#faith #god #experience

We sensible often resist intrusive love and its chaos practically, employing measures to prevent the former for fear of the latter. But for all our wit and work, that desperation for control also prevents the pure, transcendental freedom more often delivered by both. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#control #desperation #freedom #love #lover

(Q: From an outsider’s perspective, what you call “chaos magick” has a lot of rules, discipline, and order involved, and doesn’t seem very chaotic at all. What would you say to such a person?) A: I differentiate sternly between Chaos and Entropy. Only highly ordered and structured systems can display complex creative and unpredictable behaviour, and then only if they have the capacity to act with a degree of freedom and randomness. Systems which lack structure and organisation usually fail to produce anything much, they just tend to drift down the entropy gradient. This applies both to people and to organisations. ↗

— Peter J. Carroll

#chaos-magic #chaos-magick #magick #freedom

I want some one to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarreling and reconciliation I need privacy--to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#companionship #friendship #peace #privacy #quietness

Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos. ↗

— Edward Bellamy

#chaos #civilization #imagination

Great leadership isn’t shaped in the absence of opposition but in the presence of it. Great leaders draw us together by our universal humanity; they galvanize the wills of the willing; they draw clarity from the spigot of chaos. ↗

— Charles M. Blow

#clarity #humanity #leadership #opposition #will

At last, somebody in line steps forward. “I can commit,” he says. He’s a tall, lean young man with a rifle slung over his back. “What’s your name?” Chris asks. “Andrew,” he replies. “And I’m in.” Chris nods. A few other guys step forward and, after a few moments, the entire crowd of ex-POWs takes one step, signifying their decision. My chest swells with pride – pride for Chris’s leadership, pride for the people willing to give their lives to take down Omega. It’s a rush. ↗

— Summer Lane

#cassidy-hart #chris-young #romance #state-of-chaos #summer-lane