Posts in "Excerpts" Category — Page 2
The fact is, I can’t give up sleeping with the window open. Electric tramcars with all their bells ringing rage through my room. Automobiles drive across me. A door slams. Somewhere glass from a broken window clatters to the ground. I can hear the big pieces laughing and the little splinters sniggering. Then suddenly a dull muffled sound from inside a house on the other side. Someone’s coming up the stairs. Coming, coming, on and on, is there for a long time, goes past. Back in the street. A girl shrieks: ‘Ah, tais-toi, je ne veux plus!’ The tram, mad with excitement, races up, and across, and away. Someone is calling. People are running, overtaking one another. A dog barks. What a relief: a dog. Toward morning there’s even a cock crowing, and what a boundless blessing it is. Then, abruptly, I fall asleep.
— The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke
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“How do I feel?” …
If I feel bad, then is there anything
I can do to make myself feel better? …
I must fight to give myself the right to feel good
about myself and to feel good mood-wise,
regardless of any accomplishment
or nonaccomplishment whatsoever.
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I am because I am! means I exist because I exist and need no justification whatsoever for my existence. The fact of my being is enough. I require no terms, conditions or permits from myself or anyone else. I live, and in living I am fully entitled to go on living. My life, my existence, my being is not predicated on standards, values, achievements or accomplishments …
“How do I feel?” is a very important question as applied to people, issues, myself and especially as to my state of well-being. If I feel good, that’s good. If I feel bad, then is there anything I can do to make myself feel better? Am I involved in any way in a self-hating enterprise? Most important, do I feel bad because I haven’t accomplished enough? Achieved enough? Conformed enough? This is blackmail and antithetical to my philosophy. I must fight to give myself the right to feel good about myself and to feel good mood-wise, regardless of any accomplishment or nonaccomplishment whatsoever.
— Compassion and Self-Hate, Theodore Issac Rubin
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Before they’re plumbers or writers or taxi drivers or unemployed or journalists, before everything else, men are men. Whether heterosexual or homosexual. The only difference is that some of them remind you of it as you meet them, and others wait for a little while. You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.
—Practicalities, Marguerite Duras
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Where each of us may find the sources of consolation when thus afflicted by a loss is a question of personal experience and fate. I hope that somewhere in the thicket of your sprawling pain you may come upon the small spring that has already cried all the tears before, and, indeed, for you in advance. For it is unthinkable that this ever possible, providential pain, which is so often aimed at and inflicted upon human beings, is inconsolable.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
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