Six Quotes About Masochism

"Only part of us is sane. Only part
of us loves pleasure and the longer
day of happiness, wants to live to
our nineties and die in peace, in a
house that we built that shall shelter those who come after us.

The other half of us is nearly mad.
It prefers the disagreeable to the
agreeable, loves pain and its darker
night, despair, and wants to die in
a catastrophe that will set life back to its beginnings and leave
nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."
-- Rebecca West / BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON --

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"There is an overwhelming desire at
moments to escape personality, to
revel in the action of forces that
have no respect for ego, to let the
tides flow, even though they flow over us."
-- William James --

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"There are souls which, crablike,
crawl continually toward darkness,
going back in life, rather than
advancing in it; using what experience they have to increase
their deformity; growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in
an intensifying wickedness."
-- Victor Hugo --

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"Theirs be the music, the color, the
glory, the gold. Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mold; of the
maimed, of the halt and the blind
in the rain and the cold."
-- John Masefield --

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"Latent in every man is a venom of
amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses
and loathes life; a feeling of being
trapped, of having trusted and been
fooled; of being the helpless prey
of impotent rage, blind surrender,
the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, then drops him, promises and betrays, and -- crowning injury -- inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for
himself, and of regarding this 'power' as an intelligent, sentient
being, capable of being touched.

In each of us, this venom is always
ready to germinate in secret, to
permeate the organism, darken the sun, change true to false and false
to true, an hour into eternity; and
to turn all our thoughts into the fuel of a somber fire, consuming
indiscriminately our flesh, or reason, talents, and instincts, and
sometimes even that self-love which is all-powerful in man."
-- Paul Valery / ANALECTS --

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"We would rather be ruined than
changed; we would rather die in our
dread than climb the cross of the
moment, and let our illusions die."
-- W.H. Auden --

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