were it not that i have bad dreams

"[T]hy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon his heart for ever; that very vulture the creature he creates.”
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick


“Is light, is there any light any
to pay the price of
fire?”
— Charles Olson, ‘An Ode on Nativity’


“First of all the individual has to break loose from the bonds of his own reflection, but even then he is not free. Instead he finds himself in the vast prison formed by the reflection of those around him, for because of his relation to his own reflection he also has a certain relation to the reflection around him.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age [transl. Alexander Dru]


“Half-mocking the half-truth, I note
‘The wild brevity of sensual love’.
I am shaken, even by that.”
— Geoffrey Hill, ‘The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz’


“Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to waken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love [transl. Howard and Edna Hong]


“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind —
As if my Brain had split —
I tried to match it — Seam by Seam —
But could not make them fit.

The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before —
But Sequence raveled out of Sound
Like Balls — upon a Floor.”
— Emily Dickinson (937)