[dailyholzer]

rechanneling destructive impulses is a sign of maturity

[thirdity]

“I suddenly see that I know nothing. Is the blade of my knife getting blunt? I think it’s more likely that I don’t understand because what I’m seeing now is difficult: I’m stealthily entering into contact with a reality that is new to me and still doesn’t have corresponding thoughts, and much less any word that signifies it. It’s more of a feeling beyond thought.”

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

[dailyholzer]

symbols are more meaningful than things themselves

[numinousobject]

accepting the times the cat does not wish to be easily soothed

[quotespile]

“That was what happened when you were thinking of someone: every random stranger seemed to be that someone at first glance.”

— Anne Tyler, Redhead by the Side of the Road

[quotespile]

“If I had done this, if I had said that, in the end you are always more tormented by what you didn’t do than what you did, actions already performed can always be rationalized in time, the neglected deed might have changed the world.”

— Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room

[quotespile]

“When she first came here she used to think there was somebody up in those big buildings who knows what’s going on here. They would never come down and talk to her. After a while she found out nobody knows what’s going on.”

— Robert M. Pirsig, Lila

[evokit-notes]

“The soul wants Its images, and when it doesn’t find them, it makes substitutes; billboards and graffiti, for instance. Even in East Germany avid China where ads are not allowed, slogans still are written large on walls and placards posted. Spontaneously, the human hand makes its mark, insisting on personalized messages, as human nature everywhere immediately chalks its initials on monuments.”

— James Hillman / The City and Soul

[zerogate]

“It’s going to happen very soon. The great event that will end the horror. That will end the sorrow. Next Tuesday, when the sun goes down, I will play the Moonlight Sonata backwards. This will reverse the effects of the world’s mad plunge into suffering for the last 200 million years. What a lovely night that will be. What a sigh of relief, as the senile robins become bright red again, and the retired nightingales pick up their dusty tails, and assert the majesty of creation!”

— Leonard Cohen

[nousrose]

It is characteristic of the alchemists that they never lost sight of this polarity, thereby compensating the world of dogma, which, in order to avoid ambiguity, emphasizes the one pole to the exclusion of the other. The tendency to separate the opposites as much as possible and to strive for singleness of meaning is absolutely necessary for clarity of consciousness, since discrimination is of its essence. But when the separation is carried so far that the complementary opposite is lost sight of, and the blackness of the whiteness, the evil of the good, the depth of the heights, and so on, is no longer seen, the result is one-sidedness, which is then compensated from the unconscious without our help. The counterbalancing is even done against our will, which in consequence must become more and more fanatical until it brings about a catastrophic enantiodromia. Wisdom never forgets that all things have two sides, and it would also know how to avoid such calamities if ever it had any power. But power is never found in the seat of wisdom; it is always the focus of mass interests and is therefore inevitably associated with the illimitable folly of the mass man.

Mysterium Coniunctionis

Carl Jung

[dr-dendritic-trees]

““If he comes, he’ll come on time,” Smiley had said. Then why do we get here two hours early? Guillam had wanted to ask. Why do we sit here like to strangers, drinking sweet coffee out of little cups, soaked in the steam of this wretched Turkish kitchen, talking platitudes? But he knew the answer already. Because we owe, Smiley would have said if he had been in a talking mood. Because we owe the caring and the waiting, we owe this vigil over one man’s effort to escape the system he has helped create. For as long as he is trying to reach us, we are his friends. Nobody else is on his side.”

— A quote from the end of Smiley’s People which is haunting me.

[atreides]

“Spying, in all its different forms, was after all what the cold war had for a battlefield, and the spies were its ground troops. Hot wars like Korea and Vietnam might come and go, but spying was a continuum. The obsession of the two great economic systems with each other’s identity, intentions, strengths, and weaknesses had produced by the 1970s a state of mutual watchfulness and paranoia that seemed to know no bounds. Each side was ready to pay any sum, take any risk, tell any lie, to gain a seeming intelligence advantage over the other. Neither seemed able to grasp the utter sterility of this situation. It is no wonder that, when the players were finally able to look at one another’s cards, it tuned out that each had vastly exaggerated the other’s strategic capability. In that sense, the quest for intelligence took on at its worst an almost mythic form, with the spies not so much required to report the truth about the enemy as paint him in a form monstrous enough to keep the alarm bells ringing for all eternity.”

— John le Carré, Introduction to Smiley’s People

[gwinny5k]

“Each new fashion had been hailed as a panacea : ‘Now we shall vanquish, now the machine will work!’ Each had gone out with a whimper, leaving behind it the familiar English muddle, of which, more and more, in retrospect, he saw himself as a lifelong moderator. He had forborne, hoping others would forbear, and they had not. He had toiled in back rooms while shallower men held the stage. They held it still. Even five years ago he would never have admitted to such sentiments. But today, peering calmly into his own heart, Smiley knew that he was unled, and perhaps unleadable; that the only restraints upon him were those of his own reason, and his own humanity. As with his marriage, so with his sense of public service. I invested my life in institutions - he thought without rancour - and all I am left with is myself. And with Karla, he thought; with my black Grail.”

— Smiley’s People | John le Carre

[oldshrewsburyian]

“[He] had the air of a well-dressed sleepwalker who had abdicated his sense of destination.”

— The Constant Gardener, John le Carré

[arielseaworth]

“He no longer knows which parts of him are pretending. Perhaps all of him is. Perhaps he has never been anything but pretended man. A natural. A naturally pretended man. […] Let’s all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we’ll find out who we are.”

— Absolute Friends, John le Carré

[rip-davidfosterwallaceandgromit]

“Sometimes I wonder whether it is possible to be born secret, in the way people are born rich, or tall, or musical.”

— A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré

[petaltexturedskies]

She wants something. Something that doesn't exist. She wants something to counter hopelessness. She wants the wondrous thing, the star hidden behind the stars.

Hélène Cixous, from "The Perjured City" in The Selected Plays