I see you Kevin

 

Dinesen/Blixen

 

 

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The life that you seek you will never find:
when the gods created mankind,
death they dispensed to mankind,
life they kept for themselves.

 

But to give up on his need for excess, for the immense thing, the thing that made him feel like a surfer in the snow, riding the crest of an avalanche's leading edge! To say good-bye to that need would also be to accept that he was, in the matter of desire, agreeing to be dead. And when the living agree with themselves to be dead, with dark fury begins. The dark fury of life, refusing to die before its allotted time.

The movies were infantilizing their audience, Solanka thought, or perhaps the easily infantilizable were drawn to movies of a certain simplified kind. Perhaps daily life, its rush, its overloadedness, just numbed and anesthetized people and they went into the movies' simpler worlds to remember how to feel. As a result, in the minds of many adults, The experience on offer in the movie theaters now felt more real than what was available in the world outside.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future. 

 

If you're born to it, if you're like the salamander, it must be like heaven, as if heaven were on Earth. The hell must be that no one will leave you alone here in heaven. That people hunt you and people kill you and people just cannot be still in their own bodies and listen and watch and hear but must somehow escape the beat of their own hearts by ever being in motion, even when they come to rest.

Conversation enriches the understanding,

But solitude is the school of the genius.

- Gibbon, quoted by Philip Jose Farmer 

His love of the theater was that of an amateur. He picked up gossip, mementos, handbills. He loved technique, to walk backstage and see Ophelia with her mad face half rubbed off. This was humanity in theater, the scar - the old actor famous for playing whimsical judges,who rode the Queen streetcar east of the city and ate his dinner alone before joining his sleeping wife. Patrick liked that. He wanted to be fooled by the person he felt could not fool him, who stopped three yards past the side curtain and became somebody else.

- You’ve got a lot more time with her.
- No. I feel she’s loned to me. We’re veiled in flesh. That’s all.

“You don’t look so well yourself,” said Masters. 
“Growing-pains, Masters. One is always growing up, at other peoples expense. . . .”

At the end of most lives, he reminded himself, death did not arrive as a crime, but as a great mystery, which everyone had to solve alone.

... even the richest seam in the end runs out of gold. When you were your own quarry, when the material you were dredging up lay buried in the caverns of the self, a time came when there was only an emptiness left.

The Green Hat

The hundreds of books lay in soiled confusion on the floor, the wisdom of the world that has gone

to the making of the soiled nothings that we are.

He understood why the biologist liked this part of the world, how you could lose yourself here in a hundred ways. How you could even become someone very different from who you thought you were. His thoughts became still for hours of his search. The frenetic need to analyze, to atomize the day or the week fell away from him—and with it the weight and the buzz of human interaction and interference, which could no longer dwell inside his skull.

I'm like an old golf ball—I've had all the white paint knocked off me long ago. Life can whack me about now, and it can't leave a mark.

The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain—until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.

It befel upon a Fryday on Mydsomyr Evyn in rygth hot wedyr, as this creatur was komyng fro Yorkeward beryng a botel wyth bere in hir hand and hir husbond a cake in hys bosom, he askyd hys wyfe this qwestyon, "Margery, if her come a man wyth a swerd and wold smyte of myn hed les than I schulde comown kendly wyth yow as I have do befor, seyth me trewth of yowr consciens - for ye sey ye wyl not lye - whether wold ye suffyr myn hed to be smet of er ellys suffyr me to medele wyth yow agen as I dede sumtyme?"
"Alas, ser," sche seyd, "why meve ye this mater and have we ben chast this eight wekys?" 
"For I wyl wete the trewth of yowr hert." 
And than sche seyd wyth gret sorwe, "Forsothe I had levar se yow be slayn than we schuld turne agen to owyr unclennesse."