Akashic Alchemist - fragments for fiction

I am no witch, no more than am I a wizard, or soldier, architect nor adventurer. I am a peddler and spinner of ideas, of whispers, of stories, and truth concealed in lies.

[s-t-u-p-o-r-e]

“We are so attached to our mind and body, fighting the natural process of ageing and death at every turn. And yet, we forget our true Self, which has no beginning or end.”

— Jim Palmer

[fallendebil]

“And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.”

— W. B. Yeats, from “The Wanderings of Oisin” (via pagewoman)

[death-witch-envy]

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

— Oscar Wilde (via quotemadness)

[barcarole]

Dedication, from Requiem, Anna Akhmatova, In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova - The Framing texts of Requiem, p. 44 (trans. Judith Hemschemeyer)

[learnloveover]

“Night comes. A smell of almond. I hear you breathing under an infinity of stars.”

— Karl Krolow, tr. by David Mcduff, from “You Went Away,” wr. c. 1952 (via violentwavesofemotion)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Else Lasker-Schüler, tr. by Michael Hamburger, from “Georg Grosz,” written c. June 1917 (x)

[herpoeticmind]

““Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει””

— All is flux, and nothing abides. - Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BC), quoted in Plato, Cratylus 402a, and Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX.8 (c. 3rd century BC)

[wordsnquotes]

“I like the night, I have clearer ideas in the dark.”

—

Serge Gainsbourg

original: “J’aime la nuit, j’ai les idées plus claires dans le noir.”

(via wordsnquotes)

[artpropelled]

“One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.”

— G.K. Chesterton, Robert Browning

[deathbyvalentine]

How to tell if you're in a Modern Southern Gothic novel:

You used to be religious, but not any more. 

Despite this you make religious allusions constantly.

There’s a ruined plantation house.

There’s an abandoned church.

There’s more liquor stores than actual residents.

Your mother is blonde.

Your father is either somewhere else or emotionally absent.

Teenage girls are a menace. 

There’s a factory where most people in the town work.

The town has some sort of ironic name.

The police force is made up of men who just laugh at crimes.

There’s at least one dead child involved somewhere.

You were the real monster all along.

[bookgeekconfessions]

Alchemists tried for centuries to turn base metals into gold. Every time we sit down and put words on paper, we succeed where they failed. We’re conjuring something out of nothing.

Jonathan Stroud

Book Geek Quote #820

For my NaNoWriMo writers!

(via bookgeekconfessions)

[purplebuddhaproject]

Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn’t control you–you should control them.

Haruki Murakami (via purplebuddhaproject)

[teddyhammy]

[victoriousvocabulary]

English is the largest of the human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language - this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and the most flexible - despite its barbaric accretions…or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. Nobody tried to stop this process, the way some languages are policed and have official limits…probably because there never has been, truly, such a thing as ‘the King’s English’ - for the King’s English was French. English was in truth a bastard tongue and nobody cared how it grew…and it did! - enormously.

Robert Heinlein, Stranger In A Strange Land (via victoriousvocabulary)

[wnq-writers]

First drafts aren’t made to be perfect. First drafts are made to be finished.

Amanda Sickels  (via wnq-writers)

[akashic-alchemist]

She saw at once, yet sunk not -- trembled not; Beneath that grief, that loneliness of lot, Within that meek fair form, were feelings high, That deem’d not till they found their energy. While yet was Hope-- they soften’d-- flutter’d-- wept; All lost-- that softness died not, but it slept. And o’er its slumber rose that Strength which said, ‘With nothing left to love, there’s nought to dread.’ ‘T is more than nature’s; like the burning might Delirium gathers from the fever’s height. ‘Silent you stand, nor would I hear you tell What-- speak not, breathe not-- for I know it well-- Yet I would ask-- almost my lip denies The-- quick your answer-- tell me where he lies.’

Lines 93 - 106

Lord Byron’s The Corsair: A Tale published 1814

Source: Washburn, Katharine, ed. and David Rosen, ed., The Great Romantics: Selected Poems by Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993).

[akashic-alchemist]

Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer.

HUMPHRY DAVY in defense of his protégé Michael Faraday’s ‘useless’ science experiments.

Sir Humphry Davy, a Cornish chemist & inventor who contributed much to our knowledge of highly reactive elemental alkali metals (sodium, potassium, calcium) and was the first to isolate several elements (magnesium, boron, barium) and contributed to the understanding the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine.

After a laboratory accident involving the explosive nitrogen trichloride in 1813, he employed the young Michael Faraday, of whom Ernest Rutherford would later remark a generation later,  "When we consider the magnitude and extent of his discoveries and their influence on the progress of science and of industry, there is no honour too great to pay to the memory of Faraday, one of the greatest scientific discoverers of all time,” despite Faraday having received little formal education, and though being an excellent experimentalist who could clearly and simply convey his ideas, manged only the simplest algebra.

Sources: Wikipedia on Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday.