A Leak In The Safe

Begging him to wait a few moments, she stepped under the tree, looked up with an ineffable smile, and poured many roses out of her apron on the grass. She kneeled quietly beside it, but soon arose again and led the pilgrim away.

With what assurance a poet can follow the promptings of his inspiration, or, if he is also possessed of a super mundane sense, follow higher beings and surrender to his calling with childlike humility.

– Novalis

In everyone’s life there is something implacable.

– Ruth Sawtell Wallis

A liberation of the less conscious levels of the mind, an intoxicating dreaming.

– F. L. Lucas

The addition of strangeness to beauty.

– Walter Pater

A quest for wonders: fascination with the mysterious, the fantastic, the magical and the supernatural, but also with manifestations of the subconscious, dreams, hypnotism, somnambulism, clairvoyance, madness.

– Helene Scher

This, combined with the rustling of the birches at the window and the song of a distant nightingale, made such an odd mixture that it never felt as if I was awake but seemed instead as if I were sinking into another, even stranger, dream.

The most marvelous things mingled with the most ordinary, the world around him was enchanted, and he was incapable of a single thought, a single memory.

– Ludwig Tieck

Art displays the absolute balance between unconscious and conscious activity which is otherwise not possible in experience and which is thinkable only in infinity. It is only in art that the sensual and spiritual worlds merge…

– Oskar Walzel

holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!

– Allen Ginsberg

I awakened more and more and ardent longing

For deeper and a total intermingling

Grew more intense with every passing moment.

Sweet lust is of my life the fountainhead.

I am the midpoint and the holy spring

Whence every stormy longing gushes forth

And whither every longing, being broken

Returns again to restful quietude.

– Novalis

Then came a voice from heaven saying, Fear not, Thecla, my faithful servant, for I am with you. Look and see the place which is opened for you; there your eternal abode shall be, and there you will receive the beatific vision.

The blessed Thecla looked and saw the rock opened to as large a degree as that a man might enter in. She did as she was commanded, bravely fled from the vile crew, and went into the rock, which instantly closed so that there was not a crack visible where it had opened.

The men stood perfectly astonished at so prodigious a miracle and had no power to detain Thecla, but only caught hold of her veil, or hood, and tore off a piece of it.

And even that was by the permission of God…

– The Acts of Paul and Thecla

To master the irrational, to govern it freely according to its own laws is the ultimate purpose of humanity. This purpose is quite unattainable and must forever remain so if man is not to cease being human and to become divine. But he can and must approach this goal; hence the never-ending approach to this goal is the true destiny of humanity.

– Johann Gottlieb Fichte

The infinite was thus, according to the romantic creed, demanded and mentally encompassed by reason, made finite in poetry, and experienced in love. It was the creed of a yearning which, about to soar into illimitable spaces beyond mere temporal existence, could, nevertheless, find twofold satisfaction in this world: in love and in poetry.

In love and poetry the temporal embraced the eternal, the finite the infinite. The romantic ironist became a prophet and a seer.

– Oskar Walzel

“How did you do it?” I asked.

“With a hatchet. I hit him on the brow and he fell down dead. Then I pushed him over the edge of the roof.” Phillip put his hands over his ears and pressed hard. “I did this for three seconds so I wouldn’t hear him fall in the yard.” He winced and made a face. “I heard it nonetheless.”

We walked out of the Anchor Bar, crossed the street and started up 17^th Street. In a play court on the right, a whole platoon of little children were seesawing and playing hopscotch and wading in a pool in the hot sun. Philip smiled at the children. I knew he was thinking of himself as a murderer.

– Jack Kerouac

A somber, ash-scattering scene would make a heaven-sent ending for the obituary of a nut.

There’d been hardly a fruitcake trail he hadn’t followed to its bleak end, every paranormal idiocy, by his blurred lights, worthy of full investigation.

– Thomas H. Cook

“The White Woman,” he said. A very young woman in a stiff white garment was kneeling by the stream, holding a jagged strip of jawbone filled with squat, gleaming teeth. Even in the pale light under the trees, her hair was an extraordinary red.

She wrinkled a delicate nose at the stiff newness of the garment which masked, but could not conceal, a foundation young and curvilinear.

– Ruth Sawtell Wallis

“How,” he thought to himself, “would it be possible for an enormous world of life all its own to move around under our feet? For unheard-of creatures to carry on within the strongholds of the earth and be forced by the inner fires of the earth’s dark womb to grow into forms gigantic in size and powerful of mind? Could these dreadful strangers, driven up by the penetrating cold, possibly sometimes appear among us, while perhaps at the same time celestial guests, living, speaking forces of the constellations, might become visible overhead?”

– Novalis