Born on July 2 — Quotes

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.

Our Journey to the East and our League, the basis of our community, has been the most important thing, indeed the only important thing in my life, compared with which my own individual life has appeared completely unimportant. And now that I want to hold fast to and describe this most important thing, or at least something of it, everything is only a mass of separate fragmentary pictures which has been reflected in something, and this something is myself, and this self, this mirror, whenever I have gazed into it, has proved to be nothing but the upper- most surface of a glass plane. I put my pen away with the sincere intention and hope of continuing tomorrow or some other time, or rather to begin anew, but at the back of my intention and hope, at the back of my really tremendous urge to relate our story, there remains a dreadful doubt. It is the doubt that arose during the search for Leo in the valley of Morbio. This doubt does not only ask the question, “ Is your story capable of being told ? ” It also asks the question, “ Was it possible to experience it ? ” We recall examples of participants in the World War who, although by no means short of facts and attested stories, must at times have entertained the same doubts. p. 40

The price, after all, for not having died already
goes up not in leaps but step by step, and he would
pay that price, too.

On this third planet from the sun among the signs of bestiality a clear conscience is Number One.

Within him, there's awful darkness, in the darkness a small boy. <p> God of humor, do something about him, OK? God of humor, do something about him today.

Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor, Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.

Everything the dead predicted has turned out completely different. Or a little bit different — which is to say, completely different.

So every possible reality, once God gives it existence, will reveal its own identity. Its life will unfold slowly, whereas God encompasses it at a single glance.

I began to sense a momentous glory radiating from every form that met my eye- every limb and leaf, every blade of grass ablaze with the unutterable grandeur and majesty. And it seemed to me that the world I saw before me was merely an outward manifestation of a vastly powerful, deeply fundamental reality that existed just out of sight. I might not discern this veiled reality directly, but I could perceive its effects.

You see, this universe we inhabit is made up of billions of galaxies—literally beyond counting—and this is only one universe.

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.

I have begun with the easiest tasks which require the smallest amount of faith. Each succeeding task will be increasingly difficult. p. 85

He thought for a moment, brought back from his reflections. "It was only possible for me to do it," he said, "because it was necessary. I either had to write the book or be reduced to despair; it was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos and suicide. The book was written under this pressure and brought me the expected cure, simply because it was written, irrespective of whether it was good or bad. That was the only thing that counted. And while writing it, there was no need for me to think at all of any other reader but myself, or at the most, here and there another close war comrade, and I certainly never thought then about the survivors, but always about those who fell in the war. While writing it, I was as if delirious or crazy, surrounded by three or four people with mutilated bodies — that is how the book was produced." p. 46

Way I see it, everyone plays their own role in the world, and no role is more important than the other.

Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys —