Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world’s great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.
-Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett
Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, live happily and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.
-Khalil Gibran
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you.
Martha Graham
If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do with someone’s profession or with someone’s social class. According to me, an intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity—criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it—is the only mark of the intellectual function.
-Umberto Eco, “The Art of Fiction, No. 197”, The Paris Review (Summer 2008, No. 185)
And yet
to wine, to opium even, I prefer
the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;
and in the wasteland of desire
your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
And *spins a wheel* here's an ancient curse:
Iam vos ego nomine vero
Eliciam, Stygiasque canes in luce superna
Destituam: per busta sequar, per funera custos;
Expellam tumulis, abigam vos omnibus urnis.
-
Now I will lure you
by your true names,
and Stygian hounds in the light of day
forsake: through pyres I will pursue you, through burials your jailer;
I will hurl you from barrows, I will drive you from every urn.
-Lucan, Pharsalia 6.732-35
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