Dionysian Reads Quotes

The faithful of Shiva or Dionysus seek contact with those forces which ... lead to a refusal of the politics, ambitions and limitations of ordinary social life. This does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony, but also an active participation in an experience which surpasses and upsets the order of material life. ~ Alain Danielou

A fact: one picks it up and reads it, and puts it down, and there is an end to it. But an idea! That one may pick up, and reflect upon, and oppose, and expand, and so pass a delightful afternoon altogether. ~ Mary Oliver

…art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian-Dionysian duality…. The two creative tendencies developed alongside one another, usually in fierce opposition, each by its taunts forcing the other to more energetic production, both perpetuating in a discordant concord the agony which the term art but feebly denominates: until at last, by the thaumaturgy (magic or miracle) of a Hellenic act of will, the pair accepted the yoke of marriage and, in this condition, begot Attic tragedy, which exhibits the salient feature of both parents. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Am I meant to not reply to Josh From HR's texts, do you think? Hell, maybe I am. Maybe he liked me the way I like Adam The Tick Boxer. Maybe every single person in London is hoping for a text from someone else, and we're all connected in a chain of waiting. I wonder who's at the top of the chain?
Robert's phone beeps. He picks it up, reads the text, makes a derisive little snorting sound and puts it back on the table without replying.
That answers that question, then. ~ Gemma Burgess

In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author. ~ Cat Stevens

We do what we have to, to live. Sometimes that means breaking a rocks heart, or pushing roots down into ground that screams againest the intrusion. As for you-how else should our children climb to the star's but up our branches? We made our peace with that fact a long time ago, that we would be used and maybe forgotten. So be it. What you learn in your climbing will make all the life on this planet greater, more precious. And when it comes to that, who writes the things written in your body, your life? And who reads?-Our cases aren't that much different? ~ Diane Duane

for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others--the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the others--it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger's life,
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,
I can ~ James Tate

No one can say where his path will take him, even for the duration of a single day. More difficult still is to see where one's path will intersect that of another warrior.
A warrior must always be alert for such meetings. Some are generated by happenstance, and those may be benign. But others are arranged with purpose. Those must never be underestimated.
Fortunately, there are always signs. Before any trap is sprung, it must be prepared and primed and armed. If one reads the signs properly, the pattern of the attack will be clear.
But one must always remember that launching a trap is easier than defeating it. ~ Timothy Zahn, Star Wars: Thrawn

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively upon awaking and in one second reads in them the point of the earth that he occupies, the time past until his arousal; but their ranks can be mingled or broken. ~ Marcel Proust

Suddenly I realized that a cell's life is controlled by the physical and energetic environment and not by its genes. Genes are simply molecular blueprints used in the construction of cells, tissues, and organs. The environment serves as a "contractor" who reads and engages those genetic blueprints and is ultimately responsible for the character of a cell's life. It is a single cell's "awareness" of the environment, not its genes, that sets into motion the mechanisms of life. ~ Bruce H. Lipton

It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Most people's lives were stories with mysterious endings. Mine was a story with a beginning I could never make sense of. It was like fifty different unrelated strands I couldn't weave into a solid crystal. ~ Lindsay A. Franklin

One person reads the book, and cannot help telling a friend. That is vastly superior to any kind of advertisement, or clever magazine article. That is also the great power of the internet, where people share their opinions without the annoying screen of the media, and so much of the presence of my books has come from the Internet. It's a new era, a new form of war, and I embrace it. ~ Robert Greene

When someone reads a text whose meaning he wants to comprehend, he does not despise the signs and letters, calling them deceptive, contingent, and worthless husks, but rather he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, the I who wished to read the book of the world and the book of my own essential being, I have, for the sake of a previously imagined meaning, held these signs and letters in contempt, calling the world of appearances deception, calling my eye and my tongue themselves contingent, and worthless appearances. No, this is over, I have awakened, I have indeed awakened, and today is the first day of my new life." --Siddhartha ~ Hermann Hesse

Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

A writer who writes more than he reads is an amateur. ~ Harlan Ellison

The Old Religion, as we call it, is closer in spirit to Native American traditions or to shamanism of the Arctic. It is not based on dogma or a set of beliefs, nor on scriptures or a sacred book revealed by a great man. Witchcraft takes it's teachings from nature, and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, the slow growth of trees, and the cycles of the seasons. ~ Starhawk

Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest. ~ Hilary Mantel

Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page - rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words - just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are - accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer? ~ Jennifer Weiner

The headlines are critically important. The majority of the public reads little else when deciding whether or not they are interested. ~ John Caples

The tombstone over the grave of the conscience always reads: "Human Nature". ~ Stefan Molyneux

The joyful heart sees and reads the world with a sense of freedom and graciousness. ~ John O'Donohue

Raffaele slows down and reads it aloud, whispering the words as he goes. "Laetes, ~ Marie Lu

He's Post-it-noted the window," Tom says, peering to see what it reads. "It says 'Call me' and his mobile number. I might just do that," he muses. "He's kind of cute. ~ Melina Marchetta

Once in a while you have to bite the hand that reads you. ~ Tina Brown

An editor doesn't just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: "those who can read see twice as well." Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribe's title cautiously referred to writing alone (scribere = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel writes, "It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good."
In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves - this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it. ~ Susan Bell

Carol would not be a bad one to [settle down] with. She's pretty and bright, and maybe this is what love is. She's good company: her interests broaden almost every day. She reads three books to my one, and I read a lot. We talk far into the night. She still doesn't understand the first edition game: Hemingway, she says, reads just as well in a two-bit paperback as he does in a $500 first printing. I can still hear myself lecturing her the first time she said that. Only a fool would read a first edition. Simply having such a book makes life in general and Hemingway in particular go better when you do break out the reading copies. I listened to myself and thought, This woman must think I'm a government-inspected horse's ass. Then I showed her my Faulkners, one with a signature, and I saw her shiver with an almost sexual pleasure as she touched the paper where he signed. Faulkner was her most recent god[.] ~ John Dunning

Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality . . . and by the sharpness of their insights. . . . But with successive readings one's doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one's first enthusiasm may all too easily turn to an equally exaggerated aversion. Of all such writers, one might say that one cannot imagine them as children. The more we read them, the more we become aware that something has gone badly wrong with their affective life; . . . it is not only impossible to imagine one of them as a happy husband or wife, it is impossible to imagine their having a single intimate friend to whom they could open their hearts. ~ W. H. Auden

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. ~ Annie Dillard

Every person who reads your book will be far more likely to be on your side. Books are the most intensive of all current media. People are willing to spend hours and hours with a book. ~ Hank Green

The oldest woman in the village, Paciencia,
predicts the weather from the flight of birds:
Today it will rain toads, she says,
squinting her face into a mystery of wrinkles
as she reads the sky - tomorrow,
it will be snakes. ~ Judith Ortiz Cofer

The first recorded use to date of OMG is from 1917, and reads in full "I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis - O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) - Shower it on the Admiralty!" The citation comes from a letter by one John Arbuthnot Fisher, who happens to have been the admiral in charge of the British navy (a position known as first sea lord), and was written to Winston Churchill, staunch defender of both the English people and their language. ~ Ammon Shea

If one of my kids reads a book for school and I can have a conversation with her about the book and I sense that she gets what the book is about, then it doesn't really matter to me if she gets an A on the paper. ~ Michael J. Fox

When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's Bible? ~ G.K. Chesterton

There's a bookstore in New York where you could buy scripts, and I got addicted to them because they were easy, quick reads ... and the pictures were so vivid. ~ Robbie Robertson

One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it. ~ Matthew Arnold

Every first-rate editor I have ever heard of reads, edits and rewrites every word that goes into his publication ... Good editors are not 'permissive'; they do not let their colleagues do 'their thing'; they make sure that everybody does the 'paper's thing.' A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done. ~ Peter Drucker

A man who reads will find himself. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Life is uncertain.
Today you get a rose.
Tomorrow you feel the thorns.
But the end result is red, always!! ~ Shillpi S Banerrji

I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything. ~ Sylvia Plath

My mother reads tarot cards, actually, but I won't let her read mine. ~ Sam Taylor-Johnson

What a women reads makes her more attractive and more elegant than what she wears. ~ Carine Roitfeld