The Mistakes of Zweig

“Forget it all, I told myself, escape into your mind and your work, into the place where you are only your living, breathing self, not a citizen of any state, not a stake in that infernal game, the place where only what reason you have can still work to some reasonable effect in a world gone mad.” 
― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday


Just a note: I've been rereading, in spots, mostly my own notes and underlined passages, The World of Yesterday. It's so relevant to the crisis we are facing today, that of rising nationalism and fascism. It's really difficult for me to accept that this has happened in my lifetime, but that is ego and foolishness. It can happen in any lifetime and ultimately it brings only misery. I can't make the same mistakes as Zweig. As brilliant as he was, he sunk into his art, disappeared there, in total despair. One day after finishing The World of Yesterday, he and his wife died by suicide. I am optimistic by nature and the kind of person who will go down spitting, if that's all I can do. Silence is not the answer. We must not be silent, ever.

Borges on Immortality

“There is nothing very remarkable about
being immortal; with the exception of mankind,
all creatures are immortal, for they know
nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and
incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

We Must Defend Society

“a battle front crosses the entire society, continuously and constantly, and it is this battle front that puts each of us in one camp or another. There is no neutral subject. We must be someone's opponent.” 

Michel Foucault

Lola Ridge quote

Better--while life is quick

And every pain immense and joy supreme,

And all I have and am

Flames upward to the dream ...

Than like a taper forgotten in the dawn,

Burning out the quick.

                             Lola Ridge, "Dedication"

                            The Ghetto and Other Poems

Reality, Truth, Living Experience

All imagined futures lacking recognition of anthropogenic climate-change will increasingly seem absurdly shortsighted. Virtually the entire genre will be seen to have utterly missed the single most important thing we were doing with technology. --William Gibson

Shirley Jackson Quotes

“On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.”

                                     

                                          –  Shirley Jackson

“The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.” 


                                       ― Julian Barnes

Echo and the Bunnymen - The Killing Moon (Official Music Video)

One of the most beautiful song about death.

In many ways, The Fairy Tale Novel, my dark Phantasmagoric tale is about Death. I started the novel about the same time as I discovered my husband had cancer. It was too hard to write at times and I often put it aside. It's only been this year that I have returned to it full time. How can people write about Death. Well, many do. This song is extremely beautiful and has always been one of my favorites.

Sleeping Beauty

Art  (c) by Nadezhda Illarionova. 

My favorite Angela Carter quote

“If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciliatory mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.” 

                                                                       ― Angela Carter