"It is blood that moves the body..."

"I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things." -Natsume Sōseki

(Photo Unknown)

The Four Categories

"We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers."
-Milan Kundera

Books & Sex

Egon Schiele, Liegende Frau Mit Roter Hose Und Stehend (Reclining Woman with Red Pants and standing) 1912.

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck are infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
Roberto Bolaño speaking of Stéphane Mallarmé’s quote The flesh is sad—and I’ve read every book.

Life Without Sex

Robert Heinecken, Cliche Vary/Autoeroticism, 1975.
(Photographic lithograph)
“Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.”
- Henry Louis Mencken

In The Hand of Dante

“Love at first sight. Life after death. We may eventually know if we experience the latter. But how are we ever truly to know if we experience the former? Can the depths of the sea be reached in a breath, without movement? Can the stars wed two souls that have never looked upon them together?

* * * *

Her pantyhose lay on the floor beside the bed. I took them and tossed them on my cheap green vinyl traveling-bag. She knew that I thus had claimed them as mine.

They are in the drawer to my right as I set down these words, sitting here, prepared to do, or to be undone, within whatever remains of this dream that we call time.

All there, in the drawer to my right.

A vial of morphine, a pistol, the false passports that I did not use when I went to Italy to boost the documents from the archives, a lot of money, and the beige carnation of her pantyhose.

I hold this carnation now to my face and inhale the scent of her and the scent of a garden of all that is untold and untellable.

I envision myself dying like this; alone, holding my face like an oxygen mask the bunched, perfumed flower of her pantyhose.”
-Nick Tosches, “In The Hand of Dante”