Heavy words in the never quiet mind

“Even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us.”

“It is with a sort of mute, inevitable, inexplicable determination, like that in dreams, that the fascinating specters of misery and pain have always lurked among the background figures in this carnival of a world. No doubt art does not have the same essential meaning as the carnival and yet, in each, a part has always been reserved for that which seems the very opposite of pleasure and amusement.”

“It may be, too, that smells move us so profoundly, in part, because we cannot utter their names. In a world sayable and lush, where marvels offer themselves up readily for verbal dissection, smells are often right on the tip of our tongues—but no closer—and it gives them a kind of magical distance, a mystery, a power without a name, a sacredness.”

“A library is never complete. That’s the joy of it. We are always seeking one more book to add to our collection.”

"If chaos is a work of art, then my heart is a masterpiece."

About the dark matter holding together the universe, poet and astrophysicist Rebecca Elson writes, “It’s as if all there were, were fireflies / and from them you could infer the meadow.” I saw so many fireflies today; I marched and chanted and wept with 150,000 of them. In my head: At least we are many, at least we are many, at least we are many. We are making a light that proves the existence of a meadow you can’t yet see. It’s a green bright place where children everywhere are allowed to grow old. You can join us there if you like.

“Recently I became not quantifiably old but qualitatively old. Old as a state of being. As an acceptance that I’ve more or less become the person I had a chance to become.”

“Our sense of smell can be extraordinarily precise, yet it’s almost impossible to describe how something smells to someone who hasn’t smelled it. The smell of the glossy pages of a new book, for example, or the first solvent-damp sheets from a mimeograph machine, or a dead body, or the subtle differences in odors given off by flowers like bee balm, dogwood, or lilac. Smell is the mute sense, the one without words. Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasure and exaltation.”

I was following the moon when I jumped. You might say that the moon and I committed suicide together.

I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.

“For me the sun had ceased to exist; I had myself become a blazing sun. And like all the other suns of the universe I had to nourish myself from within.”

“I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.”

“Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place, we are swept up, suddenly, between the body’s smoothe, functioning predictability, and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe.”