#den

These violent delights have violent ends. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#suddenness #wisdom #shakespeare

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#sexual-personae #the-birth-of-the-western-eye #art

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it. ↗

— J.D. Salinger

#writing #hate

You know, I can't stop thinking about you. Oh really? Why you so obsessed about me? Because..you're so full of shit yet still alive. ↗

— Toba Beta

#overconfidence #obsession

The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance; We find delight in the most loathsome things; Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings, And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#devil #horror #horror

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. --as quoted in THE RIVER OF WINGED DREAMS ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#angels #civil-war #democracy #destiny #determination

She was looking for something I could never give her." Again his dark eyes bored into Julia's mind. "You have something of the same about you, young woman. Take my advice: Don't think you will find it in another person. You won't. It's not there. You must find it in yourself. ↗

— Iain Pears

#individuality #search #self-awareness #self-reliance #dreams

I also hold very strong personal convictions about censorship. I don't believe in forbidden knowledge. ↗

— Andrea Cremer

#forbidden #knowledge #nightshade #censorship

Regin: “I finally understand what a dickie-do is. Your gut does stick out more than your dickie do. ↗

— Kresley Cole

#berserker #declan-chase #dreams-of-a-dark-warrior #immortals-after-dark #kresley-cole

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. ↗

— Marianne Williamson

#confidence