Maelstrom Quotes

A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring. ~ Andrew S. Tanenbaum

It is not even accurate to say that Christianity eventually broke away from Judaism. It is more accurate to say that, out of that matrix of biblical Judaism and that maelstrom of late Second-Temple Judaism, two great traditions eventually emerged: early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Each claimed exclusive continuity with the past, but in truth each was as great a leap and as valid a development from that common ancestry as was the other. They are not child and parent; they are two children of the same mother. So, of course, were Cain and Abel. ~ John Dominic Crossan

we want to seize the value and perspective of passing things, and so to pull ourselves up out of the maelstrom of daily circumstance. We want to know that the little things are little, and the big things big, before it is too late; we want to see things now as they will seem forever-"in the light of eternity." We want to learn to laugh in the face of the inevitable, to smile even at the looming of death. We want to be whole, to coordinate our energies by criticizing and harmonizing our desires; for coordinated energy: is the last word in ethics and politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too. ~ Will Durant

Out there in the middle of the maelstrom the Eater awaits, heaving and gulping, its mouth like a giant clam's . . . its mind a frenzy of beige-colored rapid foam. A horrifying uproar, all things considered. Imagine floating through that nonsense in a life jacket. - EDWARD ABBEY ~ Kevin Fedarko

Ben wrapped his fingers tightly around mine, brown eyes fierce, his thoughts a maelstrom of anger and worry. He was only thinking of me. Of getting me away. Keep me safe.
Ben was ready to die for me.
Chance halted before a battered case halfway down the wall. He began pulling on books, muttering to himself as he shoved each one aside.
They won't get you, Ben promised abruptly. I felt his determination flowing through the bond, mixed with love and desperation. He really would give his life to protect mine. ~ Kathy Reichs

Mom was all about hellfire and brimstone. Her Old Testament God was a colossal, ancient brute, a maelstrom of blood and fire, of appetite and wrath. ~ Laird Barron

I don't know how long we stayed frozen in that moment, but it was a long time. Sometimes I think there are parts of us still there, forever staring into the emotional maelstrom of one another's eyes. ~ Tammy Blackwell

I would love to be a voice in this maelstrom of chaos and obsessive celebrity infatuation that says, 'Let's talk about something that matters'. ~ Zachary Quinto

It did not occur to me that absence of human companionship does not assure solitude. It may, on the contrary, plunge one into an environment compared with which New York or London would appear deserts. For we take memory and imagination with us. The seabirds that scream overhead or waddle along the margins of the surf; the grotesque forms of twisted cedars; the rustle of sea-grass in the wind; the interminable percussion of the breakers; the dead infinity of the sand itself - there can be no solitude, in the sense of freedom from disturbances of thought, in the presence of such things. They draw us back into the maelstrom. ("Absolute Evil") ~ Julian Hawthorne

The point is ... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world. ~ Thomas Nagel

I think that black Africa is extremely terrifying. Black Africa can become a maelstrom of warring tribes without the outside world needing to feel the need to do anything about it. ~ John Keegan

The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means "the shores where the sea breaks its back." The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury against the rocky bulwarks of the coast; giant tides eat away the sand beaches and alter the entire contour of an island overnight; williwaw winds pour down the side of a volcano like snow sliding off a roof, building to a hundred-mile velocity in a matter of minutes and churning the ocean into a maelstrom where the stoutest vessels founder. ~ Corey Ford

Self-aggrandizement and lust for power, the maelstrom of baser instincts - disfigured people. ~ Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord's wounds at arm's length. Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people's lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people. ~ Pope Francis

It was fun, although we felt like pawns, or prawns, in the maelstrom. ~ Julia Child

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The smoke! The golden smoke!
His robe whipped upward, turning him until his face was directed downward into the abyss. With his gaze on the depths, he recognized a maelstrom of boiling rapids there, the mirror of his life-precipitous currents and plunges, all movement gathering up all substance. Leto's words wound through his mind on a path of golden smoke: "Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve." Moneo fell freely then in the ecstasy of awareness. The universe opened for him like clear glass, everything flowing in a no Time. ~ Frank Herbert

Then as Anna listened another sound began to rise within the first. It began as a low keening, like the wind in a bottle tree, almost indiscernible amid the guns. Yet it was there, and it grew and grew, gaining strength and timbre until suddenly a new note broke away and was taken up: a high weird quavering like nothing that Anna had ever heard, that peopled the smoke with an army of mourning phantoms. Anna had heard the men talk of this, too - the uncanny demon cry of the Rebel army going into the attack - and now here it was for real, echoing across violence and death for the last time in a wild crescendo that seemed to peak and yet peak again: descanting blood, crying lost youth and the loss of all dreams. One last time it shrilled out of the rolling smoke, then collapsed all at once into a maelstrom of voices - the deep snarling utterance of thousands of men in hell. ~ Howard Bahr

It is beginning."
Pak Eng and Laughing Chan and Peter all look at Hock Seng with respect. "You were right."
Hock Seng nods impatiently. "I learn."
The storm is gathering. The megodonts must do battle. It is their fate. The power sharing of the last coup could never last. The beasts must clash and one will establish final dominance. Hock Seng murmurs a prayer to his ancestors that he will come out of this maelstrom alive. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

In the manner characteristic of their species they had lived hitherto without serious thought for matters of public concern. They were fully occupied in keeping themselves and their families afloat in the maelstrom of economic individualism. Inevitably their chief concern was private fulfilment, and its essential means, money. National affairs, racial affairs, cosmical events, were of interest to them only in their economic bearing, or at most as occasions of curiosity, wonder or ridicule. They produced and consumed, bought and sold, played ritual games with balls, and transported themselves hither and thither in mechanical vehicles in search of a goal which ever eluded them. They indulged in illicit sexual intercourse; or with public applause they married, propagated, launched their children upon the maelstrom. The overwhelming majority were enslaved by the custom of the herd. Nowhere was there any clear perception of the issues at stake, nowhere any recognition that the species was faced with the supreme crisis of its career. Scarcely a man or woman in Europe or America, still less in the remote East, realized that the great test of the human animal had come, and come, alas, too soon. ~ Olaf Stapledon

In the height of her happiness many years later, she would think of that solitary little girl, face downturned like a demure fucking bellflower, while inside there was the maelstrom. She'd want to smack that kid hard. Or pick her up in her arms and cover her eyes and run somewhere safe with her. ~ Lauren Groff

She expected annoyance, tolerance, perhaps even a distant amusement. She hadn't expected his reaction.
His arms closed around her like a vice, pulling her tightly up against him. And she didn't have time to kiss him - the touch of her mouth against his seemed to ignite a firestorm. She could feel him through every inch of her body, the lean, deceptively strong body beneath the suit, the heat and lure of muscle and sinew, the sheer intensity of him. She felt as if she were being absorbed into a maelstrom, and all she could do was hold onto him as he kissed her, he kissed her, using his tongue, kissing her with a thoroughness she'd never experienced. ~ Anne Stuart

Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people's lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated. ~ Kevin Cotter

I saw the Tracker - but that's wrong, really. I saw right to where the tracking thing was. I saw those winnowing tentacles come out again, and the front figure pause, and then - it's the only word that actually describes it - ooze on again on its via dolorosa. And at that the hind figure seemed to summon all its strength. It seemed to open out a fringe of arms or tentacles, a sort of corona of black rays spread out. It gaped with a full expansion, and even I could feel that there was a perfectly horrible attraction, or vacuum drag, being exerted. That was horrible enough, with the face of the super-suffering man now almost under me resonating my own terror. But the worst thing was that, as the tentacles unwrapped and winnowed out toward their prey, I saw they weren't really tentacles at all. They were spreading cracks, veins, fissures, rents of darkness expanding from a void, a gap of pure blackness. There's only one way to say it - one was seeing right through the solid world into a gap, an ultimate maelstrom. And from it was spreading out a - I can only call it so - a negative sunrise of black radiation that would deluge and obliterate everything. Of course it was still only a fissure, a vent, but one realized - This is a hole, a widening hole, that has been pierced in the dike that defends the common-sense, sensuous world. Through this vortex-hole that is rapidly opening, over this lip and brink, everything could slip, fall in, find no purchase, be swallowed up.

Gerald Heard

If you want to understand who you are and where you stand in this maelstrom of churning values, you have first to understand how commodity values get created and produced and with what consequences - social, environmental, political and the like. If you think you can solve a serious environmental question like global warming without actually confronting the question of by whom and how the foundational value structure of our society is being determined, then you are kidding yourself. So Marx insists that we must understand what commodity values and the social necessities that determine them are all about. ~ David Harvey

Where was Lauren in this maelstrom of awfulness? Where was the person she had previously thought herself to be? Intelligent, funny, in control, that Lauren. She'd been hiding as best as she could, sheltering in the back of her psyche somewhere, allowing the least evolved part of her instinctive self to be the thing that was present in this trauma. ~ Melanie Golding

Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab's quest for the whale may be mad and "monomaniacal," as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a "dumb brute," as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront.
The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a "Prometheus" with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral ("vortex") of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab's crew: "The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world." But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little ~ Northrop Frye

nub. Tori nearly came unglued and started rocking and trembling so hard, the bed shook beneath her. The fleeting caress of Sam's tongue stretched her body taut, stringing her nerve endings tighter than a barbed-wire fence. "Sam . . . please . . . I need . . . " "I know, babe. I know what you need." "I need it now . . . Please!" Tori thought she'd die if Sam didn't touch her again. She lifted her butt and felt his hands clamp around her hips, and then that wonderful magic feeling of his tongue on her flesh sent her soaring into a maelstrom of sensations too powerful to resist. Sam held on to Tori as he laved her with his tongue, milking her orgasm for several moments before finally moving ~ Anne Marie Novark

Another struggle has been the struggle to keep the value of a local and particular character, of a particular culture in this awful maelstrom, this awful avalanche toward uniformity. The whole fight is for the conservation of the individual soul. The enemy is the supression of history; against us is the bewildering propaganda and brainwash, luxury and violence. Sixty years ago, poetry was the poor man's art: a man off on the edge of the wilderness, or Frémont, going off with a Greek text in his pocket. A man who wanted the best could have it on a lonely farm. Then there was the cinema, and now television. ~ Ezra Pound

Maya felt the turbulent maelstrom of emotions inside her, stirred by all she had seen on her circumnavigation, by all that had happened and all that was going to happen ... ah, the floods within her, the flash floods in her mind! If only she could accomplish the same yoking of her spirit that they had with this aquifer - drain it, control it, make it sane. But the hydrostatic pressures were so intense, the outbreaks when they came so fierce. No pipeline could hold it. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

As passion goes, wrath - or rage - is nearly indistinguishable from love in its intensity, the two epic ends of the maelstrom that makes us human. ~ Corey Taylor

Barely able to breathe, Eva's tongue slipped across her lips.
He moved a bit closer. "Every time ye walk past, I want ye. Your scent sends my insides into a maelstrom of need."
She closed her eyes and drew out the moment, wishing he'd say that again. Oh, how delectable to listen to a medieval Scotsman declare his desire. ~ Amy Jarecki

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along. ~ Michio Kaku

If I had political responsibility, I would want to prepare for a plan B that would foresee that the European currency union, that the eurozone, no longer necessarily consists of 17 member states. And that means to make provisions so that other countries are not pulled into the maelstrom through contagion. ~ Peer Steinbruck

Why is the forecast so bland? Why instead of 'stormy' don't they just say the sea's 'a frothing maelstrom of terror and hopelessness'? ~ Jeremy Clarkson

Being sucked into a black hole would pretty much be the coolest way to die. It's not like anyone has firsthand experience, and scientists can't decide if you would spend week floating past the event horizon before being torn apart or soar into a kind of maelstrom of particles and be burned alive. I like to think of what it would be like if we were swallowed, just like that. Suddenly none of this would matter. No more worrying about where we're going or what's to become of us or if we'll ever disappoint another person again. All of it-just ... gone. ~ Jennifer Niven

The past itself is not a narrative. In its entirety, it is as chaotic, uncoordinated, and complex as life. History is about making sense of that mess, finding or creating patterns and meanings and stories from the maelstrom. ~ John H. Arnold

The once rather old-fashioned science of paleontology finds itself in a maelstrom of excitement and controversy. Astrophysicists, atmospheric scientists, geochemists, geophysicists, and statisticians are all contributing to the extinction problem. And the general public is taking part through television talk shows, magazine cover stories, newspaper editorials, and even the occasional mention in gossip columns. ~ David M. Raup

I suppose the attitude of the vast majority of people is 'Whats the hurry to do anything at all?' Most people have a job that gives them money and time off to enjoy it. Take the kids to the country, relax. Whats wrong with the way things are? I mean technology may have caused problems, but it's always solved them, hasn't it? We are healthier, and better off, and better dressed, and cleverer, and having more fun than anyone in history. And it's been good old inventive genius that's given us all this, so lets have more of the same. Tomorrow has always been better than today, so why should things suddenly be any different?... That's fine if your'e prepared to put up with a rate of change that makes today's breakneck pace look like a snail out for a walk. And a world more interdependent than it is now. and a level of specialization even more incomprehensible than it is now. And a growing avalanche of innovations each one competing with the other for the steadily shrinking amount of time there will be to make decisions about them. And a growing number of bureaucrats to process and handle those decisions. And outside this maelstrom, this core of decision making, way outside, cut off, the people who don't understand whats going on, and who wouldn't understand even if they got in to find out. ~ James Burke

At the edge of his consciousness, just outside the comprehensible grasp, he could sense the maelstrom of his repressed emotions; the humanity that was forced from him long ago. What was left was pure emotionless logic. Gone was the pre-tense of bumbling simpleton; gone was the outward show of social mediocrity; there was no reason to play human now. This was where Kato thrived, what he was crafted for, and as panic settled on the mortals below, Kato slowly unfurled the phenomenon that lay within. ~ James Hockley

His soul was swimming in the maelstrom to keep her swim in the peaceful end!" ~ AB ~ Ashish Bhardwaj

...but in the next moment I cursed myself for being so great a fool as to dream of hope at all. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

There is something exciting about this. Peter still doesn't want to have sex with Mizzy, but there is something thrilling about downing a shot of vodka with another man who happens to be naked. There's the covert brotherliness of it, a locker-room aspect, the low, masculine, eroticized love-hum that's not so much about the flesh as it is about the commonality. You, Peter, as devoted as you are to your wife, as completely as you understand her very real worries on Mizzy's behalf, also understand Mizzy's desire to make his own way, to avoid that maelstrom of womanly ardor, that distinctly feminine sense that you will be healed, whether you want to be or not.
Men are united in their commonness, maybe it's as simple as that. ~ Michael Cunningham

I surveyed my kingdom. Chaos. Cruelty. Abandon. I had always been holding back. Always been restrained. I wanted to be bigger, brighter, better; I wanted to be capricious, malicious, sly. Until now, I had not known the intoxicating sweetness of attention. In the world above, it had always been Käthe or Josef who captivated people's eyes and
hearts - Käthe with her beauty, Josef with his talent. I was forgotten, overlooked, ignored - the plain, drab, practical,talentless sister. But here in the Underground, I was the sun around which their world spun, the axis around which their maelstrom twirled. Liesl the girl had been dull, drab, and obedient; Elisabeth the woman was a queen. ~ S. Jae-Jones

Home before the leaves fall' the soldiers all shouted to their families in August 1914 as they marched toward an enemy who felt the same way. Both sides prayed to the same god for victory, with the equal assurance that that god was on their side. Like helpless actors in a play the script of which they seemed to have no role in writing, the leaders of the nations in 1914 helplessly played their parts as hourly Europe lurched toward war until all the major countries on the continent were sucked into a gigantic maelstrom that lasted for a horrendous 1,561 days, toppled four monarchies, destroyed a centuries-old social structure, decimated thousands of towns and villages, and left a number of dead that God alone could count. As for the misery the war caused, it cannot begin to be calculated. The dead can be buried and forgotten and the villages rebuilt, but for the survivors the mental scars could not be erased except by death. ~ Jamie H. Cockfield

There is a mode of vital experience -- experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils -- that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience "modernity." To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world -- and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, "all that is solid melts into air. ~ Marshall Berman

My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Straightening up so the full force of that cold blast hit him square in the face, Qhuinn glared into the rush, picturing those pines ahead that he couldn't see because his eyes were watering from the wind. Opening his mouth, he screamed bloody murder, adding his voice to the maelstrom.
Godd*mn it, he wasn't going down like a pussy. No ducking, no pathetic oh-please-God-no-saaaaaave-me. F**k that. He was going to meet death with his fangs bared and his body braced and his heart pounding not from fear, but from a whole boatload of ...
Blow me, Grim Reaper! ~ J.R. Ward

The Conscious mind is a maelstrom of fleeting thoughts , images, sensations, feelings , conflicting desires , and doubts ; barely able to confine its attention to a single clear objective for a microsecond before secondary thoughts begin to adulterate it and provoke yet further trains of mental discourse. If you do not believe this, then attempt to confine your conscious attention to the dot at the end of this sentence without involving yourself in any other form of thinking, including thinking about the dot. ~ Peter J. Carroll

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all. ~ Harold Pinter

To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing. ~ Cormac McCarthy

We'd thought the same, once. We'd deceived ourselves into thinking we were the masters, that every force bowed to our command. And what happened? They destroyed everything!'
'I don't-'
'Understand! I see that! They are conjurations - manifestations - they exist to warn you. They are the proof that all that you think to enslave will turn on you.' And it backed away. 'The end begins again, it begins again.'
Cotillion stepped forward. 'Light, Dark and Shadow - these three - are you saying-'
'Three?' Tulas Shorn laughed with savage bitterness. 'What then of Life? Fire and Stone and Wind? What, you fools, of the Hounds of Death? Manifestations, I said. They will turn - they are telling you that! That is why they exist! The fangs, the fury - all that is implacable in nature - each aspect but a variation, a hue in the maelstrom of destruction! ~ Steven Erikson

If collapse is anything, it is a planetary immersion in the maelstrom of
paradox. Unless we understand and honor paradox, we will end up, like all of
the mainstream media on earth, asking all of the wrong questions. ~ Carolyn Baker

Every man alive is half idiot & half hero. Only heroes could survive in this maelstrom & only idiots would want to. ~ Rex Stout

And what of our own universe? The newest conjecture is that all that we experience - from the tiniest vibrating string of energy to that massive galaxy spinning around a maelstrom of reality-ripping black holes - may be nothing more than a hologram, a three-dimensional illusion that, in fact, we may all be living in a created simulation. Could that be possible? Could Plato have been right all along: that we are blind to the true reality around us, that all we know is nothing more than the flickering shadow on a cave wall? ~ James Rollins

He walks the soft grass, wet with fresh rain, jeans slung low on his hips and shirt hanging open, still dripping from the fevered maelstrom that set fire to the night sky. Fury in his step and passion furrowing his brow...He is my perfect storm... ~ Virginia Alison

If I wrote at all, I must throw myself headlong into the great political maelstrom, and would of course be swallowed up like a fishing-boat in the great Norway horror which decorated our school geographies; for no woman had ever done such a thing, and I could never again hold up my head under the burden of shame and disgrace which would be heaped upon me. But what matter? I had no children to dishonor; all save one who had ever loved me were dead, and she no longer needed me, and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one could be better spared than I. ~ Jane Swisshelm

There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality. ~ William Faulkner

Adelina, stop."
It is Magiano. Magiano. Stop. The name is a small light, but it is there, and I cling to it in the maelstrom around me. I falter as he reaches me and pulls me into a rough embrace.
"He didn't kill her," Magiano is whispering. "Stop. Stop." His hand cradles the back of my head. ~ Marie Lu

Somewhere, the billion dreams of the town since its origin stirred in a maelstrom far from the reach of the shrimpers' nets. Old dreams still burned with the power of their one night on earth, but burned deep and forbidden in regions denied to men. ~ Pat Conroy

The second decade of the twenty-first century - just 150 years after Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kurtbeny, early LGBT rights theorists, ignited the idea of same-sex freedom in 1868 - we find ourselves in a heady, global maelstrom of unimaginable liberation and continued stark oppression. ~ Michael Bronski

I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I'm a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual. ~ Primo Levi

As a writer you slant all evidence in favor of the conclusions you want to produce and you rarely tilt in favor of the truth. ...This is what a writer does: his life is a maelstrom of lying. Embellishment is his focal point. This is what we do to please others. This is what we do in order to flee ourselves. A writer's physical life is basically one of stasis, and to combat this constraint, an opposite world and another self have to be constructed daily. ...the half world of a writer's life encourages pain and drama, and defeat is good for art: if it was day we made it night, if it was love we made it hate, serenity becomes chaos, kindness became viciousness, God became the devil, a daugher became a whore. I had been inordinately rewarded for participating in this process, and lying often leaked from my writing life--an enclosed sphere of consciousness, a place suspended outside of time, where the untruths flowed onto the whiteness of a blank screen--into the part of me that was tactile and alive. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Very close, I want to hear your voice; and then I'll lose myself in the maelstrom of your eyes, your lips and your hair - you know it very well, you my beguiling siren and you rob me, mercilessly, of my thinking. ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Nothing is more interesting than repressed emotion. The appearance of sardonic coldness and stoicism which has deceived you is but a hollow mockery; beneath it I secrete a maelstrom of impassioned feeling and a mausoleum of blighted hopes. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate.
I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.
I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.
And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am ~ Fernando Pessoa