Quotes

Below is a fairly random collection of quotes I want to keep handy and also to share.

“I walk everywhere, rejecting the internal combustion engine as an effete surrender to laziness and the ignoble advantage of convenience.” (Guy Davenport)

“Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.” (Milan Kundera)

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.” (Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart)

“More conservative minds deprive coincidence of meaning by treating it as background noise or garbage, but the shape-shifting mind pesters the distinction between accident and essence and remakes this world out of whatever happens. At its obsessive extreme such attention is the beginning of paranoia (all coincidence makes ‘too much sense’), but in a more capacious mind it is a kind of happy genius, ready to make music out of other people’s noise.” (Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World)

“A friend described to me how her perception of the world was transformed during a workshop….She was invited to practice looking with her peripheral vision, rather than the narrowly focused attention into which our culture normally entrains us. She learned that, for people living in tribal cultures, peripheral vision – scanning widely and loosely for a wealth of interconnected information in their immediate surroundings – is their ordinary way of looking. The intensely focused, object-oriented look that is the norm in modern technocratic civilization, is in the tribal view fraught with terrible power and terrible risk, and so is reserved for use only by shamans and medicine people who have learned how to deploy it correctly.” (Cat Lupton, Edge of the Eye)

“Again and again the shaman has to free himself from a deep depression by a creative act. By action he has to bind the disintegrating elements of his psyche into a unity by means of a synthesis, a mysterious psychic activity.” (Andreas Lommel, Shamanism, The Beginnings of Art)

“You might suppose that supernatural beings of this kind are being visualised as if they were mediaeval aristocrats, but I sometimes wonder if the imitation was not the other way round. Traditions of the Wild Hunt and its congeners are so universal that it may have been the mortal kings who first went hunting because they wanted to take on themselves the magic of the fairy ride.” (Jeremy Harte, “Under the Greenwood Tree”)

“You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough – even white people – the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.” (Crow elder, as reported by poet Gary Snyder, quoted from Nature and the English Diaspora by Thomas R. Dunlap)

“Life is short
And pleasures few
And holed the ship
And drowned the crew
But o! But o!
How very blue
the sea is.”
(Clive Barker, Abarat)

“I’d lived so long apart from others that I’d marveled when I saw a group passing on the road. Now my world was quickly filling, but with souls, not the living. While the idea of it felt sharp, even cold in my chest, it rested easy, as if it were simply a new fit.” (The Keening, A. LaFaye)

“When the Universe seems to confirm our fictions as opposed to our supposed theories, then this suggests a strange relationship between fiction, mind, perception, and cosmos that is far more gripping than simply solving a whodunit.” (Alan Moore)

“Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.” (Neil Gaiman)

“However, this has always been the real schism in any religion or spiritual community….not between those who believe and those who don’t, or between two different sets of beliefs, but between those who follow what’s written down or taught because they have no other experience, and those who the Gods and spirits bother and pester, and who take their beliefs from that. Mystics have always been the real troublemakers, even more so than infidels.” (Raven Kaldera)

“Stone: do you stand on the grave of Charidas?
The son of Arimmas of Cyrene? He lies here.
Charidas: what’s it like down there?
Dark, all dark.
And do the dead come back?
Lies, all lies.
And Pluto?
A myth, no more.
I’ve no hope left.
I speak the truth. But I can tell you good news, too: Meat is cheap, down here.” (Callimachus)

“Divination is a means of discovering information which cannot be obtained by ordinary means or in an ordinary state of mind.” (Piers Vitebsky, The Shaman)

“What you describe is how it happens to everyone: magic does slide through you, and disappear, and come back later looking like something else. And I’m sorry to tell you this, but where your magic lives will always be a great dark space with scraps you fumble for. You must learn to sniff them out in the dark.” (Robin McKinley)

“The thing that is closest to your soul is the thing you’re going to avoid the most. The thing that will tap into the part of you that has not yet come to the fore but wants to be expressed, but you’re so afraid of it – you will absolutely find every single thing in your life to avoid doing that. And that… there is no trick about that. You just need to be aware of that. I think the awareness is somewhat curative and if you’re really aware that the things you’re going to avoid the most are the things that are going to scare you the most, that you might actually have to show up if that thing actually worked… That’s only going to be addressed by your willingness to step up to the plate.” (David Allen)

“Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.” (Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi)

“For those who have shifted into the Otherworld, the transition back becomes hard, if not impossible, after a certain point; a number of folktales throughout Scandinavia mention that those who have wholly gone into the Otherworld for a time and been returned are never entirely happy with life in the Middle-Garth.” (Kvedulf Gundarsson, Elves, Wights and Trolls)

“The Nightmage was the first of them for Anna,” he continued, “and he gave her the Sight to see the rest. Under his influence, Anna began to paint the paintings in this house. It is the best work she’s ever done; true work……But what she didn’t understand is that they have artists among them too. They call them mages. And for some of them, we are the materials they use. Our lives are their raw canvas; our emotions are the paints. We’re the clay: they push a little here, they prod a little there, till the work is done. If they drive a man or woman insane in the process, it matters little to them. They are amoral beings, Anna told me. They are neither good nor bad; those concepts mean nothing at all to them. The Nightmage was an artist, like Anna. And she was the work that he was creating. When she was strong in herself and in her art, the work they created of each other was good. But later, when Anna was frightened, and a bit unstable… then it all went wrong.” (Terry Windling, The Wood Wife)

“The third reason [why our Lord hideth himself] is that thou be never quite secure; for security begetteth carelessness and presumption….the fourth reason is that thou mayest seek him more earnestly….the fifth reason is that thou receive him the more joyfully on his return…the sixth reason is that thou mayest the more wisely keep, and the more firmly hold him when thou hast got him.” (Acren Riwle, a 12th century guide for anchoresses)

“No man wishes to be weak. Yet my weakness is also my gift. What is commonplace in one world may be a source of terror in the other. A closed door, the baying of a hound. And yet, what is a mystery in this place becomes clear and simple in that other. It is image and reflection, reality and vision, world and Otherworld.” (Son of the Shadows, Juliet Marillier)

“A commitment to daily practice gives us the flexibility and strength we need in order to evolve. I’ll let you in on an occult secret now: everyone struggles to do the work. There may always be a fight within you to maintain a regular spiritual practice, especially when it may not feel very good. Work can be hard, and it can also be very fulfilling. Most of us feel a desire to work and a sometimes equal desire to lie back down and ignore what is most helpful to us. The push and pull between these two impulses causes the friction that we need for our growth. One cannot turn lead into gold without the lead itself, a container for the process, and some heat. You are the lead, inert. Your spiritual practice, your work, is the container. The heat created by the “yes” bumping against the “no” is the source of your alchemical change. For example, the “yes” of getting up at 5:30 a.m. to do energy work, prayers, and sitting meditation bumps quickly up against the “no” of wanting to stay in bed and sleep until 8. When I get up, something new has the opportunity to awaken.” (T. Thorn Coyle, Evolutionary Witchcraft)

“The world is absurd. Ugly absurd. To repair ugly absurdity, you can’t just be normal. You need an alternative absurdity. A beautiful absurdity. We call it ‘divine madness.’” (Tzvi Freeman)

“Follow your heart as long as you live,
and do not work more than is necessary.
Do not shorten the time that you might spend following your heart,
for wasting time is vexing to the spirit.
Put in work sufficient to keep your household in order,
and the remainder of the day belongs to your spirit.
Whatever happens, follow the heart,
for wealth does no good if one is annoyed!” (Ptah-hotep)

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.  He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new universal and liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex and will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” (Henry David Thoreau)

“The most widely known characteristic of the Trappists is their vow of silence, which, for those of us outside the Order, seems to be part of their penitential way of life, since we think of silence between members of a community as a deprivation. But the penance, for some, is in the communal life itself: eating, working, sleeping, praying together. Silence gives some relief from this unremitting togetherness and is a safeguard for that solitude which is essential to a contemplative life.” (Hermits: The Insights of Solitude by Peter France)

“At the same time it is not altogether easy to be perfectly honest with oneself, and solitude brings this fact out. The wood may well foment new madnesses that one did not suspect before. But it would seem that solitude is not a satisfactory setting for concerted, thoroughgoing madness. To be really mad, you need other people. When you are by yourself you soon get tired of your craziness. It is too exhausting.” (Thomas Merton)

“I really think that all through history most of the bad stuff quietly eliminates itself in its particular form from generation to generation. It may be replaced by other bad stuff, but the fashion disappears. Whereas the good stuff renews itself. Anything that was good in the writing of Sophocles some good director will discover again and will reproduce. But the bad stuff – when it’s forgotten, it’s gone for ever.” (Robert Lax)

“The land remembers. Men dance and chant, they fight with sticks, and one rides among them on a hobbyhorse, striking them with a bladder filled with pebbles…. we don’t forget, we just forget why. There is no magic left in the festive practices of Oxford, or Grimley, or wherever – the Morrismen and Mummers – no magic unless the mind that enacts the festival has a gate opened to the first forest.” (Lavondyss, Robert Holdstock)

“When one looks at the whole range of sources, both in verse and in prose, the picture that emerges is pretty clear. The vast majority of Greeks believed that the gods desired to communicate with mortals, that they did so through signs of various kinds, and that there were religious experts who could correctly interpret those signs. Divination was a primary means of bridging the gap between the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible, the past and the future, and the human and the divine. There were, to be sure, rival means, but none of them ever replaced or eclipsed the central role of divination. Divination was so vitally important to the Greeks that it was included, second only to medicine, among the technai (arts, skills, or crafts) that Prometheus gave to humankind.” (The Seer in Ancient Greece by Michael Flower)

“What the Greeks called ‘the craft of divination’ (mantike techne) was the art of interpreting the meaning of signs that were sent by the gods. The god-sent sign is the instrument of mediation between the knowledge of the gods and the more limited knowledge of humans. It was not only the responsibility of the seer to choose the correct interpretation amidst a range of possible interpretations; it was also essential first to recognize the sign as a sign. A chance event becomes an omen when the circumstances require it, ‘when the underlying tension of a personal situation kindles the signifying power of an omen.’ The meaning of some omens and portents was obvious once they were recognized as such, of others less so; but in either case there could be no interpretation until the act of recognition had taken place.” (The Seer in Ancient Greece by Michael Flower)

“Knowledge that lies outside the range of understanding can only be gained in a state that also lies outside this range.” (Philipp Vandenberg, The Mystery of the Oracles)

“A holy theatre not only presents the invisible but also offers conditions that make the perception possible.” (Peter Brook, quoted in Susceptible to the Sacred by Bani Shorter)

“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein)

“Who art thou?, asked the guardian of the night.
From crystal purity I come, was my reply,
And great my thirst, Persephone.
Yet heeding thy decree, I take to flight,
And turn, and turn again, forever right.
I spurn the pallid cypress tree,
Seek no refreshment at its sylvan spring,
But hasten on towards the rustling river-
Of Mnemosyne, wherein I drink to sweet satiety.
And there, dipping my palms between
The knots and loopings of its mazy stream,
I see again, as in a drowning swimmer’s dream,
All the strange sights I ever saw,
And even stranger sights no man has ever seen.” (the movie Klimt)

“The cupbearer walked and all the dervishes were in hot pursuit.
He carrying a wineskin, we drunkards were after him.
He led the way to the Tavern of Magi
The lovers and the worshippers of wine followed his every step.
Sometimes he danced and howled in drunkenness,
And we others echoed his delirium.
Where he walked, there my life went before me
My heart sought after him and my body released my soul, to keep up.
The daf sang his praises, and harp followed daf.
Endure the pain of his love to find the serenity of the relief thereafter.
The cupbearer walked and all the dervishes were after him.”  (Shah Ni matallah Vali)

“When Dionysus truly enters your life- actually comes to you… the ancients used the word epiphany for when the gods revealed themselves… it’s a pants-shitting, dry-heaving, did I die in my sleep, OMG THERE’S A HOLE IN MY HEAD, I’m fucking going nuts, I am not in my body, WHY DO I HAVE HOOVES, I can see you and feel you and see everything and feel inside of you, I WILL NEVER DRINK AGAIN I SWEAR, i have just been touched by a thousand hands and sung to by the world… sort of experience.” (ginandjack on tumblr)

“If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let god consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.” (Donna Tartt, The Secret History)

“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them.  Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.” (C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces)

“The only difference between a seiðman and an ordinary man is that the seiðman operates in a world with all the doors and windows open, and the ordinary man doesn’t know that the windows and doors even exist.” (Bil Linzie)

“There is in the world not a single human who can speak my language; or, more simply, not a single human who can speak; or, even more simply, not a single human.” (Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading)

“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.” (Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus”)