Ginger Magnum

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.  -Pascal Mercier

Everything, it seemed,  was built on opposites, on division.  No breath could both be in and out,  none could be free and yet orderly.  Always the one paid for the other,  though each was equally essentia l . Narcissus and Golmund ~ Herman Hesse

It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone May Sarton Journal of a Solitude 

“I don’t travel with a camera … My holiday becomes the snapshots and anything I forget to record is lost. Apart from that the photographs never seem to be very evocative.”  Alex Garland.   The Beach

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! Mario Savio

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told. Neil Gaiman   The View From The Cheap Seats

Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes Antoine de Sainte-Exupery - Le Petit Prince

The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change. Barbara W. Tuchmann. The Guns of August

"Have you given the horse strength......He gallops into the clash of arms. He mocks at fear, and is not frightened; nor does he turn back from the sword......He devours the distance with fierceness and rage; nor does he stand firm, because the trumpet has sounded. At the blast of the trumpet he says, 'Aha!' He smells the battle from afar, the thunder of captains and shouting."  Job 39: 19-25.

I had a certain talent for friendship,  but I never had friends, either because there were'nt any or because the friendship I conceived was an error of my dreams . I always lived in isolation, increasingly so the more I lived conscious of myself.   Fernando Pessoa  The Book of Disquiet .

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.  Aldous Huxley

“There are decades where nothing happens; and  there  are weeks where decades happen.” Vladimit Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)

To  know  more, one must  feel  less, and  vice versa … Nature, the soul, love, and God, one recognizes through the heart, and not through the reason. Were we spirits, we could dwell in that region of ideas over which our souls hover, seeking the solution. But we are earth-born beings, and can only guess at the Idea — not grasp it by all sides at once. The guide for our intelligences through the temporary illusion into the innermost centre of the soul is called  Reason . Now, Reason is a material capacity, while the soul or spirit lives on the thoughts which are whispered by the heart. Thought is born in the soul. Reason is a tool, a machine, which is driven by the spiritual fire. When human reason … penetrates into the domain of knowledge, it works independently of the  feeling , and consequently of the  heart . letters to his family - Fyodor Mikailovitch Dostoevsky

A scarce, artificial and belated phenomenon, love can only blossom under certain mental conditions, rarely conjoined, and totally opposed to the freedom of morals which characterizes the modern era. Veronique had known too many discotheques, too many lovers; such a way of life impoverishes a human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible damage. Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immortality, and never two. In reality the successive sexual experiences accumulated during adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag. And so one leads, obviously a slag's life; in ageing one becomes less seductive, and on that account bitter. One is jealous of the young, and so one hates them. Co

He sleeps in a foetal position. In his waking hours, he walks with a languorous elegance as if accustomed to living in a liquefied medium. By his movements, one would think that he found air denser to wade through than water. My Art, My Life: An Autobiography  _ Diego Rivera (from the afterward by Freda Kahlo)