“My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm’s edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.”
– Edvard Munch
Art – Orpheus by Melchior Lechter.
“To my amazement, I have heard that there are people who have never seen a gnome. I can’t help pitying these people. I am certain there must be something wrong with their eyesight.”
― Axel Munthe
Art by Hasse Bredenberg.
“The meaning of life is to find your gift; the purpose of life is to give it away. What will you find and give away?” – Pablo Picasso
Art tribute – Rene Magritte, The land of miracles, 1964
“There is anger and passion and love–and sometimes these three things are very much alike; often the same – in the writing of anything. Writing is a means of recovering and also of avenging. Words become the hooks by which you reach out to reclaim people and times and emotions.” – Arthur Miller
Art – Emil Holárek (1867-1919), An Artist’s dream.
“I like your letters like whiskey, and cherries, and smoke, and honey.”
Dylan Thomas, from a letter to Emily Holmes Coleman, 1937
Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst
“To know another human being in their essence, you don’t really need to know anything about them – their past, their history, their story. We confuse knowing about with a deeper knowing that is non-conceptual. Knowing about and knowing are totally different modalities. One is concerned with form, the other with the formless. One operates through thought, the other through stillness.”
– Eckhart Tolle
Art by Carel Lodewijk Dake.
“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn.” – Arthur Rimbaud
Art by Andrew Ferez.
“My brother used to ask the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless but it is right; for all is like the ocean, all things flow and touch each other; a disturbance in one place is felt at the other end of the world.”
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Art by Armando Veve.
“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.” – Oscar Wilde
Art by Salvator Dali.
Incredible, sensational wordsmithing by David Lohrey:
https://suddendenouement.com/2018/10/24/waste-not-want-no-david-lohrey/
“Good for you is not a greeting. Good for you means congratulations.
These words say good bye. We’re not together.
There’s no but.
Good for you spells doom. It’s the American creed. It’s a celebration
of greed. Good for you doesn’t say hello.
Don’t look at the what, look at the how!
How the now cow, a sound noun, is brown.
There’s no but.
Something really vast has changed.
It’s got a billy goat brain, a hummingbird mouth…”
David Lohrey was born on the Hudson River but grew up on the Mississippi in Memphis. He currently teaches in Tokyo. He has reviewed books for The Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register, has been a member of the Dramatists Guild in New York, and he is currently writing a memoir of his years living on the Persian Gulf. His latest book, The Other Is Oneself: Postcolonial Identity in a Century of War: 20th Century African and American Writers Respond to Survival and Genocide, is available on Amazon.com. He is also the author of Machiavelli’s Backyard from Sudden Denouement Publishing.
Machiavelli’s Backyard is Available at Amazon.com, Amazon Canada, Amazon Europe, Book Depository and other major book retailers.
Paperback, 106 pages/Published September 1st 2017 by Sudden Denouement Publishing.