"As he came in her mouth a few moments later, with a long and throbbing flood of semen, he had this vision, at just that second, which has continued to radiate inside him: that each ejaculation contains several billion sperm cells -- or roughly the same number as there are people in the world -- which means that, in himself, ...
2025-02-07 09:11:26 +0000 UTC View Post
"Here is God's purpose-
for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law.
not academic ...
“So I was privileged to see the last rites of the Bokononist faith. We made an effort to find someone among the soldiers and the household staff who would admit that he knew the rites and would give them to "Papa".
We got no volunteers. That was hardly surprising, with a hook and an oubliette so near. So Dr. von Koenigsw...
“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know i...
2025-02-05 06:54:46 +0000 UTC View Post
“Read it if you like or don't read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with stri...
2025-02-05 06:54:22 +0000 UTC View Post
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, ...
2025-02-04 12:36:03 +0000 UTC View Post
“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways;...
2025-02-04 08:07:42 +0000 UTC View Post
"Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggress...
2025-02-04 08:04:08 +0000 UTC View Post
“The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life. It is not possib...
2025-02-03 10:07:33 +0000 UTC View Post
“One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these plants will be home to some life form which wi...
2025-02-03 09:57:28 +0000 UTC View Post
In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.
The spoon which was melted scrapes against
the bowl which was melted also.
No one else is around.
Where have they gone to, brother and sister,
mother and father? Off along the shore,
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, ligh...
“Psychoanalysis: An Elegy"
What are you thinking about?
I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wi...
“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beaut...
2025-01-31 08:35:17 +0000 UTC View Post
"Here he stood. Here he sat. Here he knelt. Here he lay. Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the bed;...
2025-01-31 08:30:52 +0000 UTC View Post
“We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clu...
2025-01-30 06:55:01 +0000 UTC View Post
1.
Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
or a flower,
unless it was both.
Something came up out of the water,
a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don’t know w...
I noticed that there's been a lovely uptick of members over the last few days. Welcome to my humble little Patreon one and all.
I thought I'd take the opportunity to get a little bit of a feel of what people here are enjoying the most. To that end, please tick the statement below that best describes you? (Of course I u...
"A clear night over south Knoxville. The lights of the bridge bobbed in the river among the small and darkly cobbled isomers of distant constellations. Tilting back in his chair he framed questions for the quaking ovoid of lamplight on the ceiling to pose to him:
Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonig...
Chapter 2.XXXV.
No matter—as an appendage to seamstressy, the thread-paper might be of some consequence to my mother—of none to my father, as a mark in Slawkenbergius. Slawkenbergius in every page of him was a rich treasure of inexhaustible knowledge to my father—he could not open him amiss; and h...
2025-01-29 05:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know whi...
2025-01-28 07:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
“But you will be back, and you will always be here. Don’t think that in death you go far from the earth; you remain down here with everything—the part of you that loved, which is the most important part. That part of you will patiently be here as the earth changes colour, exhausts itself, breathes in fresh life again, a...
2025-01-28 06:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
"
23. Goethe wrote Theory of Colours in a period of his life described by one critic as "a long interval, marked by nothing of distinguished note." Goethe himself de- scribes the period as one in which "a quiet, collected state of mind was out of the question." Goethe is not alone in turning to colo...
2025-01-27 08:41:25 +0000 UTC View Post
“Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself....
2025-01-27 07:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
“I had to first overcome the nightmares: my dreams were populated by menaces, shadows, murderous persecutions, disgusting events and objects, ambiguous sexual relations that excited me while also making me feel guilty. Here, I was a character inferior to my level of consciousness in the real world, capable of misdeeds that ...
2025-01-26 19:18:32 +0000 UTC View Post
"I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make your dear voice come alive again?
I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the ...
2025-01-26 07:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
“You can't see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the most intimate beloveds, your own face is invisible to you. You can see other parts of yourself, arms and legs, hands and feet, s...
2025-01-25 08:08:36 +0000 UTC View Post
“71. Rare Things-- A son-in-law who's praised by his wife's father. Likewise, a wife who's loved by her mother-in-law.
A pair of silver tweezers that can actually pull out hairs properly.
A retainer who doesn't speak ill of his master.
A person who is without a single quirk. Someone who's ...
“Another woman catches sight of Fischerle's hump on the ground and runs screaming into the street: 'Murder! Murder!' She takes the hump for a corpse. Further details - she knows none. The murderer is very thin, a poor sap, how he came to do it, you shouldn't have thought it of him. Shot may be, someone suggests. Of course, ...
2025-01-24 11:34:27 +0000 UTC View Post
"All who missed out on life. All who were never loved. All who could not love. All who could not watch over a child. All who never traveled to other countries. All who never knew the many different kinds of animals. All who never heard a foreign language. All who were never astonished by faith. All who did no...
2025-01-24 10:07:51 +0000 UTC View Post
