It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

I think we’re always responsible for our actions. We’re free. I raise my hand – I’m responsible. I turn my head to the right – I’m responsible. I’m unhappy – I’m responsible. I smoke a cigarette – I’m responsible. I shut my eyes – I’m responsible. I forget that I’m responsible, but I am. I told you escape is a pipe dream. After all, everything is beautiful. You only have to take an interest in things, see their beauty. It’s true. After all, things are just what they are. A face is a face. Plates are plates. Men are men. And life…is life.

If someone told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine of them would be blank. On the last page I would write, “I recognize only one duty and that is to love.” And as far as everything else is concerned, I say no.

Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It’s not local at all. I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through.
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

If today were not an endless highway

If tonight were not a crooked trail

If tomorrow wasn't such a long time

Then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all

Yes only if my own true love were waiting

And if I could hear her heart a-softly pounding

And only if she were lying by me

And I lie in my bed----- once again

‎-A veces sueño...
-Pondré eso en tu lápida.

We stopped for coffee in the Redwood forest. Giant dripping leaves. Spoons of powdered cream. I wanted to kiss you, but wasn't sure how. Like those indians lost in the rainforest, forced to drag burning wood wherever they went. They had all forgotten how to start a fire. This is why people OD on pills and jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. Anything to feel weightless again. Those poor, lost indians-when the white men found them, most died of TB; the rest went insane. In our motel room you're drinking Slice and gin, reading Moby Dick on the other bed. Remember the first time we slept together? You said it felt like when you learned to float.

Pretending that we'll meet
Each time I turn a corner
I walk a little faster

Pretending life is sweet
Cause love is around the corner
I walk a little faster

Can't begin to see my future shine as yet
No sign as yet
You're mine as yet

Rushing toward a face
I can't divine as yet
Keep bumping into walls
And taking lots of falls

But even though I meet
At each and every corner
With nothing but disaster

I set my chin a little higher
Hope a little longer
Build a little stronger castle in the air
And thinking you'll be there
I walk a little faster

Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.

It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is, matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?

Let this be the epitaph for my heart

Cupid put too much poison in the dart
This is the epitaph for my heart

because it's gone, gone, gone
and life goes on and on anon

and death goes on, world without end
and you're not my friend

Who will mourn the passing of my heart
Will its little droppings climb the pop chart

Who'll take its ashes and, singing,

fling them from the top of the Brill Building

And life goes on, and dawn, and dawn

and death goes on, world without end

and you're not my friend

Without condemning or condoning, I understand.

“Is that what you are? The most powerful thing in the universe and you’re just a puppet following a script?”

“We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.”

There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.

Through the darkness of future past,
The magician longs to see,
One chance out between two worlds:
Fire walk with me

Nobody’s really loved for themselves are they? I mean, all love is projection. Think about it, I’m in your movie and you’re in mine, two different films really. We don’t really know each other; we just make a guess at knowing each other, right? I think the same is true about love.

And so I drank one
It became four
And when I fell on the floor
I drank more

Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says “But, doctor…I am Pagliacci.” Good joke.

I prefer the stillness here. I am tired of earth. These people. I’m tired of being caught within the tangle of their lives. They claim their labors are to build a heaven yet their heaven is populated with horrors. Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. A clock without a craftsman.
It’s too late. It always has been. It always will be. Too late.

Miracles. Events with astronomical odds of occurring, like oxygen turning into gold. I’ve longed to witness such an event, and yet I neglect that in human coupling, millions upon millions of cells compete to create life, for generation after generation until, finally, your mother loves a man, Edward Blake, the Comedian, a man she has every reason to hate, and out of that contradiction, against unfathomable odds, it’s you - only you - that emerged. To distill so specific a form, from all that chaos. It’s like turning air into gold. A miracle. And so… I was wrong. Now dry your eyes, and let’s go home.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us.

6. El sol cada día es nuevo.

7. Si todas las cosas se convirtiesen en humo, se las distinguiría por el olfato.

12. Son distintas las aguas que cubren a los que entran en el mismo río.

21. Muerte es todo lo que vemos despiertos, sueño [lo que vemos] durmiendo.

23. Si no hubiese injusticia, se ignoraría hasta el nombre de la justicia.

30. Este mundo, el mismo para todos, ningún dios ni hombre lo hizo. Sino que ha sido siempre y es y será

un fuego siempre vivo, que se enciende según medidas y se apaga según medidas.

51. No comprenden cómo lo que está en lucha consigo mismo puede estar de acuerdo: unión de [fuerzas]

contrarias, como el arco y la lira.

53. El conflicto es el padre de todas las cosas, el rey de todas las cosas. A unos ha hecho dioses y a otros

hombres; a unos ha hecho esclavos y a otros libres.

54. La armonía invisible es mejor que la visible.

59. El camino recto y el tortuoso son uno solo y el mismo.

91. Es imposible bañarse dos veces en el mismo río.

103. En un círculo se confunden el principio y el fin.

111. La enfermedad hace agradable la salud, el hambre la saciedad, la fatiga el reposo.

112. La sabiduría es la virtud más importante, y la sabiduría consiste en decir la verdad y obrar según la

naturaleza y escuchando su voz.

116. A todos los hombres es concedido poder conocerse a sí mismos y pensar sabiamente.

124. El arreglo más hermoso se parece a un montón de basuras reunido al azar.

126. Lo frío se calienta, lo caliente se enfría, lo húmedo se seca, lo seco se humedece.

Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quiet valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lighting flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.

Cada hombre tiene su destino, más allá de la ética; este destino es su carácter

Detrás de cada caverna hay otra que se abre más profunda, y por debajo de cada superficie un mundo subterráneo más vasto, más extraño, más rico; bajo todos los fondos, bajo todas las fundaciones un subsuelo aún más extraño.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.
It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction—every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.

People say, ‘I’m going to sleep now,’ as if it were nothing. But it’s really a bizarre activity. ‘For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I’m going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.’

If you didn’t know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you’d seen.

They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be OK? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the ‘mind adventures’ got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren’t unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.’

So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you’re in a science fiction movie. And whisper, ‘The creature is regenerating itself.’

We are often deceived in love, often hurt, often unhappy. But we love. And with one foot in the grave, you turn to look back on your life and say to yourself, ‘I may have suffered, I may have been deceived, but I have loved. It is I who have lived, and not a fake me created by my pride and my fears.'

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

Cuanto más te alejas más crece tu sombra

Me importa un pito que las mujeres tengan los senos como magnolias o como pasas de higo; un cutis de durazno o de papel de lija. Le doy una importancia igual a cero, al hecho de que amanezcan con un aliento afrodisíaco o con un aliento insecticida. Soy perfectamente capaz de soportarles una nariz que sacaría el primer premio en una exposición de zanahorias; ¡pero eso sí! -y en esto soy irreductible- no les perdono, bajo ningún pretexto, que no sepan volar.

True, I’d give my right arm
To keep you safe from harm
And true, for you, I’d move to Ecuador
And I’d keep a little farm
Chop wood to keep you warm
But I don’t really love you anymore

So we don’t know anything
You don’t know anything
I don’t know anything
about love
But we are nothing
You are nothing
I am nothing
Without love

No razonar
desaparecer
cuando tenías que estar
te echaste a correr
lo que hiciste en mí
no tiene perdón
y yo sé que me siento mucho más fuerte
sin tu amor.
Mucho tiempo atrás
me hiciste sentir
que nuestro amor era más
y de esa forma vivir
no sé más quién soy
de qué te reís
y ahora sé que me siento mucho más fuerte
sin tu amor.
No sé más que hacer
no sé qué decir
cuando tenías que estar
te echaste a reír
lo que hiciste en mí
no tiene perdón
y ahora sé que me siento mucho más fuerte
sin tu amor
y yo sé que me siento mucho más fuerte
sin tu amor
oh sin tu amor.

It's not up to you

I wake up
And the day feels
Broken
I tilt my head
I'm trying to get an angle
'Cause the evening
I've always longed for
It could still happen

How do I master
The perfect day
Six glasses of water
Seven phonecalls

If you leave it alone
It might just happen
Anyway

It's not up to you
Oh it never really was
It's not up to you
Oh it never really was
It's not up to you
Well it never really was
It's not up to you

If you wake up
And the day feels
Ah broken
Just lean into the crack
(Just lean into the crack)
And it will tremble
Ever so nicely
Notice
How it sparkles
Down there

I can decide
What I give
But it's not up to me
What I get given
Unthinkable surprises
About to happen
But what they are

It's not up to you
Well it never really was
It's not up to you
Oh it never really was
It's not up to you
Oh it never really was
It's not up to you
Oh, me, share
It's not up to you
It's not up to you
Oh, it never really was
It's not up to you
Well, it never really was
It's not up to you
It's not up to you
It's not up to you
It's not up to you

There's too much
Clinging
To peak
There's too much
Pressure

I came across a wild flower, marvelled at its beauty and at the perfection of all its parts, and exclaimed: ‘But all this in you and in thousands like you blossoms and fades; it is not noticed by anyone and in fact is often not even seen by any eye’. But the flower replied: ‘You fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others; my joy and delight consist in my being and in my blossoming.

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?

Loneliness is an unhappy compound of having lost one’s point of reference, of suffering the fate of individual and collective discontinuity and of living through or dying from a crisis of identity to the point of alienation of one’s self.

Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.

I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful.

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

I don't want to get over you. I guess I could take
a sleeping pill and sleep at will and not have to
go through what I go through. I guess I should take
Prozac, right, and just smile all night at somebody new,
Somebody not too bright but sweet and kind who would
try to get you off my mind. I could leave this agony behind
which is just what I'd do if I wanted to, but I don't
want to get over you cause I don't want to get over love.
I could listen to my therapist, pretend you don't exist
and not have to dream of what I dream of; I could listen
to all my friends and go out again and pretend it's enough,
or I could make a career of being blue--I could dress
in black and read Camus, smoke clove cigarettes and drink
vermouth like I was 17 that would be a scream but I
don't want to get over you.

If you think you can leave the past behind
You must be out of your mind
If you think you can simply press rewind
You must be out of your mind, son
You must be out of your mind

You want what you've turned off turned on
You call it sunset, now it's dawn
You can't go 'round just saying stuff
Because it's pretty
And I no longer drink enough
To think you're witty

I had a dream and you were in it
The blue of your eyes was infinite
You seemed to be
In love with me
Which isn't very realistic

You know not how to love, you know not how.
In vain I loved you so.
You know not how to love, you know not how.
And you will never know.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

There is no more obnoxious way to punish a man than to force him to perform acts which make no sense to him, as when one empties and fills the same ditch indefinitely, when one makes soldiers who are being punished march up and down, or when one forces a schoolboy to copy lines.

Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky. This sense of being abandoned, which might in time have given characters a finer temper, began, however, sapping them to the point of futility.

For Jane

225 days under grass

and you know more than I.

they have long taken your blood,

you are a dry stick in a basket.

is this how it works?

in this room

the hours of love

still make shadows.

when you left

you took almost

everything.

I kneel in the nights

before tigers

that will not let me be.

what you were

will not happen again.

the tigers have found me

and I do not care.

Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine
meltin' in a pot of thieves
wild card up my sleeve
thick heart of stone
my sins my own
they belong to me, me

people say "beware!"
but I don't care
the words are just
rules and regulations to me, me

Deep in the forest I whirl like I did as a little girl
Let my eyes rise in the sky looking for you
Oh you know, I would go anywhere at all
'Cause no star is too far with you, with you

Yo no sentía por Warhol lo mismo que Robert. Su obra reflejaba una cultura que yo quería evitar. Detestaba la sopa y la lata no me decía apenas nada. Prefería un artista que transformara su época, no que la reflejara.

you said every road is a good road

between the next road and your last road

every love is your best love and every love is your last love

and every kiss is a goodbye

La forma de la aparición de la voluntad es sólo el presente, no el pasado ni el porvenir; éstos no existen más que para el concepto y por el encadenamiento de la conciencia, sometida al principio de razón. Nadie ha vivido en el pasado, nadie vivirá en el futuro: el presente es la forma de toda vida.

A human being is a spirit. But what is a spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.

I hadn’t understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe; but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only the words ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ still had any meaning for me.

Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

At those times he didn’t know whether he was happy or felt like crying. At least he felt in harmony at such moments, he had nothing to do but wait quietly, without quite knowing for what.

Language is a skin. I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire

There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!

and when there's trouble I don't like running
but I'm afraid I got more in common
with who I was than who I am becoming

Fate was not kind, life was capricious and terrible, and there was no good or reason in nature. But there is good and reason in us, in human beings, with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than nature and fate, if only for a few hours. And we can draw close to one another in times of need, understand and love one another, and live to comfort each other. And sometimes, when the black depths are silent, we can do even more. We can then be gods for moments, stretch out a commanding hand and create things which were not there before and which, when they are created, continue to live without us. Out of sounds, words, and other frail and worthless things, we can construct playthings — songs and poems full of meaning, consolation and goodness, more beautiful and enduring than the grim sport of fortune and destiny. We can keep the spirit of God in our hearts and, at times, when we are full of Him, He can appear in our eyes and our words, and also talk to others who do no know or do not wish to know Him. We cannot evade life’s course, but we can school ourselves to be superior to fortune and also to look unflinchingly upon the most painful things.

That which always was,
and is, and will be everlasting fire,
the same for all, the cosmos,
made neither by god nor man,
replenishes in measure
as it burns away.

It occurred to me, the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.

I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

A Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan, October 13, 1994.

You'll be given love

You'll be taken care of

You'll be given love

You have to trust it

Maybe not from the sources

You have poured yours

Maybe not from the directions

You are staring at

Twist your head around

It's all around you

All is full of love

All around you

All is full of love

You just ain't receiving

All is full of love

Your phone is off the hook

All is full of love

Your doors are all shut

All is full of love!

BREVE COMO LA BELLEZA,
LA BELLEZA ABSOLUTA,
LA QUE CONTIENE TODA LA GRANDEZA Y LA MISERIA DEL MUNDO
Y QUE SÓLO ES VISIBLE PARA QUIENES AMAN.

a medida que continúa el juego

deberías procurar decir cada vez más claro

lo que de veras

crees

incluso si lo que de veras

crees

resulta

equivocado.

culminación del dolor.

oigo incluso cómo ríen

las montañas

arriba y abajo de sus azules laderas

y abajo en el agua

los peces lloran

y toda el agua

son sus lágrimas.

oigo el agua

las noches que consumo bebiendo

y la tristeza se hace tan grande

que la oigo en mi reloj

se vuelve pomos en la cómoda

se vuelve papel sobre el suelo

se vuelve calzador

ticket de la lavandería

se vuelve

humo de cigarrillo

escalando un templo de oscuras enredaderas...

poco importa

poco amor

o poca vida

no es tan malo

lo que cuenta

es observar las paredes

yo nací para eso

nací para robar rosas de las avenidas de la muerte.

Yes

I try

to kill myself in small amounts,

an innocuous occupation.

Actually I’m hung up on it

I can't deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future, which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.

terrible arguments.

and, at last, lying peacefully

on her large bed

which is

spread in red with cool patterns of flowers,

my head and belly down

head sideways

sprayed by shaded light

as she bathes quietly in the

other room,

ist is all beyond me,

as most things are,

I listen to classical music on the small radio,

she bathes, I hear the splashing of water.

My pain is self-chosen

At least, so The Prophet says

I could either burn

Or cut off my pride and buy some time

A head full of lies is the weight, tied to my waist

The River of Deceit pulls down, oh oh

The only direction we flow is down

Down, oh down

Down, oh down

Down, oh down

Down, oh down

My pain is self-chosen

At least I believe it to be

I could either drown

Or pull off my skin and swim to the shore

Now I can grow a beautiful shell for all to see

The River of Deceit pulls down, yeah

The only direction we flow is down

Down, oh down

Down, oh down

Down, oh down

Down, oh down

The pain is self-chosen, yeah

Our pain is self-chosen

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain, but when one has it there’s no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don’t think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn’t happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don’t need company, whether you are not in a mood to get out. No, don’t worry, they’ll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them.

No sólo existe lo que puede verse, existe también lo que se intuye, lo que se promete, lo que se da, existe lo robado y lo que no conseguimos robar.

I’ll wander these streets until I’m dead tired,

I’ll learn how to live by myself, how to meet the eyes

of each passing face and remain the same woman.

This coolness that rises, reaching into my veins,

is a truer awakening than any I’ve felt

at morning: the only thing is, I feel stronger

than my body, and the morning’s edge is colder than ever.

The mornings when I was twenty are gone.

Tomorrow, twenty-one: tomorrow I’ll walk down the street;

I remember each stone, each wide strip of sky.

Tomorrow people will start to see me again,

and my head will be higher and I might even pause

to glance at myself in the windows. Other mornings,

I was young without knowing it, not even aware

that it was me walking by, that I was a woman,

my own woman. The skinny child that I was

awoke from a wail that had lasted for years:

now it’s as if that wail never happened.

And all I want now are colors. Colors don’t cry,

they’re like waking up: tomorrow the colors

come back. Each woman will walk down the street,

each body a color—even the children.

And my body, dressed in a frivolous red

after so much pallor, will get its life back.

I’ll feel the gazes of others gliding around me,

and I’ll know that I’m me. And glancing around,

I’ll see myself among people. Every new morning

I’ll walk down the street, looking for colors.

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love—any love—reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness

The great lovers will always be unhappy, because for them love is great and so they ask of their beloved the same intensity of thought that they have for her – otherwise they feel betrayed.

Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

Nunca más deberás tomar en serio las cosas que no dependen sólo de ti. Como el amor, la amistad y la gloria.

El mundo no era una hilera de causas y efectos proyectada eternamente hacia delante, sino algo finito que se repite eternamente, de forma que todo lo que alguna vez ha sido y alguna vez será se halla apresado en el ahora, en un Eterno Retorno, a la espera tan sólo de los Superhéroes para volver a emerger.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably

every day

for lack

of what is found

there

Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere, just ask him. If you listen, he’ll tell you how he got there. How he forgot where he was going, and that he woke up. If you listen, he’ll tell you about the time he thought he was an angel or dreamt of being perfect. And then he’ll smile with wisdom, content that he realized the world isn’t perfect. We’re flawed, because we want so much more. We’re ruined, because we get these things, and wish for what we had.

You don’t know what love is
Until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues
Until you’ve loved a love you had to lose
You don’t know what love is

Rules for Happiness:
something to do,
someone to love,
something to hope for.

I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were - I have not seen
As others saw - I could not bring
My passions from a common spring
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow - I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone
And all I lov’d - I lov’d alone.

"People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture that they were brought up in. People have attention spans of 5 seconds and as much depth as a glass of water."

Y dormíamos tan juntos que amanecíamos siameses,
y medíamos el tiempo en latidos.

You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.

I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old-fashioned bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.

Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to anymore. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love.

"Apparently orgasm is the only point where your mind becomes completely empty--you think of nothing for that second. That's why it's so compelling--it's a tiny taste of death. Your mind is void--you have nothing in your head save white light."

If I did have a tumor, I would name it Marla. Marla, the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you would stop tonguing it, but you can’t.

"I want what we all want,” said Carl. “To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced."

La tristesse durera toujours.

The first time I saw you, I knew it would never last/ I'm not half what I wish I was

I can deal with some psychic pain
if it'll slow down my higher brain

I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.

Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they’re also what tear you apart.

Nobody on the outside, no, not even God himself, knows what a man suffers on the inside. There’s no language to convey it. It’s beyond all human comprehension. It’s so vast, so wide, so deep that even the angels with all their powers of understanding and all their powers of locomotion could never explore the whole of it.

I tear myself from the window and stumble across the room; I glue myself against the looking glass. I stare at myself, I disgust myself: one more eternity. Finally, I flee from my image and fall on the bed. I watch the ceiling, I'd like to sleep.

I had no motives, no incentives to exert myself, no duties. Life tasted horribly bitter. I felt that the long-standing disgust was coming to a crisis and that life pushed me out and cast me aside. I walked through the grey streets in a rage and everything smelt of moist earth and burial… How had I, with the wings of youth and poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals—and now this! How had the paralysis crept over me so slowly and furtively, this hatred against myself and everybody, this deep-seated anger and obstruction of all feelings, this filthy hell of emptiness and despair.

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we’re passing one another without a look of recognition.

"Come here," he said. "I'll whisper something: I like you, but not too much. I don't want to like anybody too much." Then it hit me and I just blurted, "I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them." He was definite. "Nobody knows me." So that was it; the end. "Goodbye for good, then," I said.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.