Ginger Magnum

"He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god." —Friedrich Nietzsche

"It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see, the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing." Don DeLillo - POINT OMEGA

"Time slows down when I'm here. Time becomes blind. I feel the landscape more than I see it. I never know what day it is. I never know if a minute has passed or an hour. I dont get old here." Don DeLillo - Point Omega

"I am not talking about secrets or deceptions,I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what noone knows about you that allows you to know yourself." Don DeLillo - Point Omega

"Elsewhere, everywhere, my day begins in conflict, every step I take on a city street is conflict, other people are conflict." Don De Lillo - Point Omega

"No company's more hateful than your own You dodge and give yourself the slip; you seek In bed or in your cups from care to sneak In vain: the black dog   follows you and hangs Close on your flying skirts with hungry fangs". HORACE - Satires(II , vii)

I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing. Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood  

"And never have I felt so deeply at one at the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world" ALBERT CAMUS- L'Etranger

Begin at the beginning’ the King said, very gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’ LEWIS CARROLL (1832-98)

I dwell with a strangely aching heart … —  Robert Frost,  from “ Ghost House ,

I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. —  Ecclesiastes 1:14

"But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in the old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before." —Henry David Thoreau,  Walden , 1854

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure.”  ―  Tom Stoppard ,  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

"We were together. I forget the rest." - Walt Whitman

Would you like an adventure now, or shall we have our tea first? Peter Pan

There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless. —  F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful And Damned)

"..we're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other,but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing." Charles Bukowski

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”  ―  François Rabelais

"NO ONE IN MY FAMILY, NOT ONE OF MY FRIENDS OR CLASSMATES REALIZED THAT I WAS GOING THROUGH LIFE ASLEEP. IT WAS LITERALLY TRUE: I WAS GOING THROUGH LIFE ASLEEP. MY BODY HAD NO MORE FEELING THAN A DROWNED CORPSE. MY VERY EXISTENCE, MY LIFE IN THE WORLD, SEEMED LIKE A HALLUCINATION. A STRONG WIND WOULD MAKE ME THINK MY BODY WAS ABOUT TO BE BLOWN TO THE END OF THE EARTH, TO SOME LAND I HAD NEVER SEEN OR HEARD OF, WHERE MY MIND AND BODY WOULD SEPARATE FOREVER. ‘HOLD TIGHT,’ I WOULD TELL MYSELF, BUT THERE WAS NOTHING FOR ME TO HOLD ON TO." -Haruki Murakami,  Sleep    

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”  ―  John Waters

I fall in love with everything, I also hate everything. It’s very hard to be a misanthrope and a romantic. — M. Manson

How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you’ll never meet them. All right, so we do the best we can. Granted. But we must still realize that love is just the result of a chance encounter. —Charles Bukowski

Archaeologists have not yet discovered any stage of human existence without art. Even in the half-light before the dawn of humanity we received this gift from Hands we did not manage to discern. Nor have we managed to ask: Why was this gift given to us and what are we to do with it? And all those prophets who are predicting that art is disintegrating, that it has used up all its forms, that it is dying, are mistaken. We are the ones who shall die. And art will remain. The question is whether before we perish we shall understand all its aspects and all its ends. — Alexander Solzhenitsyn,  Beauty Will Save the World

Recently, when I got out of the elevator at my usual hour, it occurred to me that my life, whose days more and more repeat themselves down to the smallest detail, resembles that punishment in which each pupil must according to his offense write down the same meaningless (in repetition, at least) sentence ten times, a hundred times or even oftener; except that in my case the punishment is given me with only this limitation: “as many times as you can stand it. —  Franz Kafka, 

"Out beyond ideas of wrondoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī-  13th-century  Persian  poet, jurist, theologian, and  Sufi  mystic

"Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but  function.  Stay inside, go out - I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself." -  Albert Camus , from  Notebooks, 1951-1959

I CAME TO A POINT WHERE I NEEDED SOLITUDE AND JUST STOP THE MACHINE OF ‘THINKING’ AND ‘ENJOYING’ WHAT THEY CALL ‘LIVING’, I JUST WANTED TO LIE IN THE GRASS AND LOOK AT THE CLOUDS. JACK KEROUAC 

WHENEVER TWO PEOPLE MEET, THERE ARE REALLY SIX PEOPLE PRESENT. THERE IS EACH MAN AS HE SEES HIMSELF, EACH MAN AS THE OTHER PERSON SEES HIM, AND EACH MAN AS HE REALLY IS.” -WILLIAM JAMES

"Did you see that Disney film in elementary school -The Living Desert? "Yes," I answered. ... Our world's exactly the same. Rainfalls and the flowers bloom. No rain, they wither up. Bugs are eaten by lizards, lizards are eaten by birds. But in the end, every one of them dies. They die and dry up. One generation dies, and the next one takes over. That's how it goes. Lots of different ways to live. And lots of different ways to die. But in the end that doesn't make a bit of difference.   All that remains is a desert." HARUKI MURAKAMI - South of the Border, West of the Sun

“ Some women let you kiss them while some kissed you back— but just. Others kissed with enthusiasm, but it was with the same kind of enthusiasm they felt for a good meal, a Bette Davis film, or a lovely present they’d just been given. But she was different. She was hungry for you, hungry to kiss you, to hear what you had to say; hungry to tell you what was on her mind. To his mind, this overall hunger was what defined her. It was the greatest compliment he had ever received from a woman and he never grew tired of it.   —  JONATHAN CARROLL   ( FROM THE NEW BOOK)

“If I could hold light in my hand I would give it to you and watch it become your shadow.” — Charles Ghigna,  Present Light

“ Sometimes he thought of past love affairs as graffiti written across the story of his life. Most of it was easily wiped away with a rag and any kind of cleaning fluid. In contrast, there were some scribbles that had been drawn on with black permanent ink. These were tougher to remove. Sometimes no matter how much he rubbed and scrubbed, faint traces of them remained for a long time. Finally there was the graffiti that had been carved deep into his surface with a sharp knife and fierce determination. It was usually small because any carving *that* deep took time and real effort. But it was the most permanent. No way could he ever erase it unless layers of himself were sanded away and obviously that was impossible. The only thing to do was accept it as part of his being now, like a scar or a bad tattoo. As it aged in years to come, it became less visible but never disappeared.   —  JONATHAN CARROLL

“ My memory loves you; it asks about you all the time…   —  JONATHAN CARROLL

“ That’s one of the nicest things about physical intimacy— for a little while you got to see your partner at their most vulnerable. However that’s also a problem with certain people. Because sometimes we take our new knowledge of that surprisingly fragile person into the everyday but they do not. They leave “naked fragile me” back in the bedroom. So if you try to address this being, they either don’t recognize who you’re talking to, or resent you’ve witnessed that side of them.   —  JONATHAN CARROLL

“ When they were together, it touched him that she so frequently used and wrote the word “forever” when referring to their relationship. It was only after it had ended did he realize her definition of the word meant “right now” as opposed to, well, forever.   —  JONATHAN CARROLL

"The past beats within me, like a second heart." — John Banville  - The Sea

"I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world." — Albert Camus,  L’etranger

I can not love you with a love
         That outcompares the boundless sea,
 For that were false, as no such love
         And no such ocean can ever be. But I can love you with a love
         As finite as the wave that dies
 And dying holds from crest to crest
         The blue of everlasting skies. ―  Angela Manalang-Gloria , excerpt from  To the Man I Married

"Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it." ―  Claude Monet

"I hate you God. I hate you as though you actally exist." -Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

" I hate a Roman named Status Quo!" he said to me. "Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, "live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It is more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping it's life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake the tree and knock that great sloth down in his ass." -Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

"Those who are hardest to love, need it the most." Peaceful Warrior

"If she's amazing, she won't be easy. If she is easy, she won't be amazing. If she is worth it you won't give up. If you give up, you're not worthy......Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just got to find the one's worth suffering for." Bob Marley

"She was a truly beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep, convoluted pasageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all." Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance

"I seek images that don't exist, and if they do they're crumpled and concealed like summer clothes in the winter, when frost stings the mouth." Adam Zagajewski,  The Room I Work In

"If there is no God, then I am God." Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed (1872)

"I live in my dreams—that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That’s the difference." Hermann Hesse, Demian

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." -  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call. Go after her because that’s what you should do if you love someone, don’t wait for them to give you a sign because it might never come. Don’t let people happen to you, don’t let me happen to you, or her, she’s not a fucking television show or tornado. There are people I might have loved had they gotten on the airplane or run down the street after me or called me up drunk at four in the morning because they need to tell me right now and because they cannot regret this and I always thought I’d be the only one doing crazy things for people who would never give enough of a fuck to do it back or to act like idiots or be entirely vulnerable and honest and making someone fall in love with you is easy and flying 3000 miles on four days notice because you can’t just sit there and do nothing and breathe into telephones is not everyone’s idea of love but it is the way I can recognize it because that is what I do. Go scream it and be wi

Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. — Ray Bradbury,  Something Wicked This Way Comes

Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal. Fernando Pessoa, from the Preface of The Book of Disquiet ,

I’d woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist. —  Fernando Pessoa,  The Book of Disquiet

"..not all those who wander are lost;..." J.R.R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings

"If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it."     C.S.LEWIS

"I had escaped between the mountains and into the soil like a whisper on a soft breath. And though the wind did not pick me up, the fields of wheat washed at my knees." .Georgie Whots, On Gray Seas                                                                                                                                                                        

"The soul aids the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird which bears up its own cage." Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

"I had to remind myself again, try not to think."    Charles Bukowski, Factotum

" I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." -WALDEN, Henry David Thoreau

'It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious. ’  -  Henry David Thoreau

"It was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything." JOSEPH HELLER ,  CATCH-22

The thing about this bookshelf is that each of these books is a vast experience unto itself, while also being both self-contained and superbly useless. Reading any one of them doesn’t get you anywhere particularly meaningful; you haven’t arrived or graduated; you’ve just gone and done something that passes the time. It’s like taking a long walk with a friend who’s got a lot to say. There’s no cumulative purpose to it — it’s just an excellent way to waste your life. JONATHAN LETHEM

In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have done had they been loved. “ ” from "Faith Healing" (1960), Phillip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. “ ” from "Aubade" (1977), Phillip Larkin

"Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth," -Phillip Larkin

"For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain." -HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

"Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of angels. " -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

" Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength". - Sigmund Freud

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England William Shakespeare, Richard II , Act 2

"I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one's life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one's loves and friendships." - Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And here we are as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. -Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"

"She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn't care." -Douglas Adams, MOSTLY HARMLESS

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down". - KURT VONNEGUT Jr.

“If they had only heard those boys in France and Flanders who called out ‘Early Doors!’ themselves in a theatrical memory, as they went so early in their youth to break down the doors of death.”. G.K.Chesterton

"My dear I think of you always and at night I build myself a warm nest of things I remember and float in your sweetness till morning". ZELDA TO F.SCOTT FITZGERALD, 1931

"According to Grek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two seperate beings, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves".            -PLATO'S   THE SYMPOSIUM

I HAVE CONVINCED MYSELF THAT THERE IS NOTHING IN THE WORLD-NO SKY, NO EARTH, NO MINDS, NO BODIES. DOESN'T IT FOLLOW THAT I DON'T EXIST? NO, SURELY I MUST EXIST IF IT'S ME WHO IS CONVINCED OF SOMETHING. BUT THERE IS A DECEIVER, SUPREMELY POWERFUL AND CUNNING WHOSE AIM IS TO SEE THAT I AM ALWAYS DECEIVED. BUT SURELY I EXIST, IF I AM DECEIVED. LET HIM DECEIVE ME ALL HE CAN, HE WILL NEVER MAKE IT THE CASE THAT I AM NOTHING WHILE I THINK THAT I AM SOMETHING. THUS, HAVING FULLY WEIGHED EVERY CONSIDERATION, I MUST FULLY CONCLUDE THAT THE STATEMENT "I AM, THEREFORE I EXIST" MUST BE TRUE WHENEVER I STATE IT OR MENTALLY CONSIDER IT. -DESCARTES, MEDITATIONS II

“Girlfriends have to be cheerful,” he insisted, “light and bright is essential, otherwise, what’s the point?” - Michael Winner

"Beautiful as a statue, tender as a night of love in the moonlight." -Leopold Sdar Senghor

"I think and think and think. I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it". Jonathan Safran Foer , Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

"We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something seperate from us. So, when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we've lost our connection to ourselves." Andy Goldsworthy

Giri’ is an essential part of Japanese society. It means the burden of obligation to all whom you encounter in your daily life.

"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost." Gustave Flaubert

"So therefore I dedicate myself to myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger- because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being." Jack Kerouac

  "I am not a graceful person. I am not a Sunday morning or a Friday sunset. I am a Tuesday 2 a.m., I am gunshots muffled by a few city blocks, I am a broken window during February. My bones crack on a nightly basis. I fall from elegance with a dull thud, and I apologize for my awkward sadness. I sometimes believe that I don’t belong around people, that I belong to all the leap days that didn’t happen. The way light and darkness mix under my skin has become a storm. You don’t see the lightning, but you hear the echoes." Unknown

"Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly." - Morticia Addams

"I only feel like myself when I am alone." -Peter Cameron,   Someday this pain will be useful to you.

"The breaking of a wave can not explain the whole sea." -Vladimir Nabokov

"Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out." -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey

"Art never comes from happiness." - Chuck Palahniuk , CHOKE

How clear, how lovely bright, How beautiful to sight Those beams of morning play; How heaven laughs out with glee Where, like a bird set free, Up from the eastern sea Soars the delightful day.   To-day I shall be strong, No more shall yield to wrong, Shall squander life no more; Days lost, I know not how, I shall retrieve them now; Now I shall keep the vow I never kept before.   Ensanguining the skies How heavily it dies Into the west away; Past touch and sight and sound Not further to be found, How hopeless under ground Falls the remorseful day. A.E.HOUSMAN