Stella Maris Quotes

Names?' the receptionist asked us. “Jesus,” Jamie answered. “Mary,” said Stella. “Satan,” I said as I walked past her and pushed open the door to Ira Ginsberg’s office.

Mary, you know I hate parties. My idea of hell is a very large party in a cold room where everybody has to play hockey properly.

If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be? It would be this: the world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.

Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief.

If the world itself is a horror then there is nothing to fix and the only thing you could be protected from would be the contemplation of it.

Nobody comes with names. You give them names so that you can find them in the dark.

When all trace of our existence is gone, for whom then will this be a tragedy?

The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.

I think our time is up. I know. Hold my hand. Hold your hand? Yes. I want you to. All right. Why? Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.

I would like to belong but I dont.

I'm not really concerned about what other people believe. I dont consider them qualified to have an opinion.

Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules . . . The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension.

At what age in a child’s life does rage become sorrow?

I gave up apologizing for myself a long time ago. What should I say? That I’m sorry to be that which I am? I’d very little to do with it.

If you’re sane enough to know that you’re crazy then you’re not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.

People are interested in other people. But your unconscious is not. Or only as they might directly affect you. It’s been hired to do a very specific job. It never sleeps. It’s more faithful than God.

Sites that have been host to extraordinary suffering will eventually be either burned to the ground or turned into temples.

The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.

Names?” the receptionist asked us. “Jesus,” Jamie answered. “Mary,” said Stella. “Satan,” I said as I walked past her and pushed open the door to Ira Ginsberg’s office.

Those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished.

Host and sorrow to waste as one without distinction until the wretched coagulant is shoveled into the ground at last and the rain primes the stones for fresh tragedies.

If psychosis was was just some synapses misfiring why wouldnt you simply get static?

We’ve been a long time without a nuclear war. Yes. Well, it’s probably like any bankruptcy. The longer you’re able to put it off the worse it’s going to be. The next great war wont arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead.

Where do starfish come from?” asked Sam. “From the sky,” answered Stella. “Starfish are shooting stars that fell in love with the sea.” “Weren’t the stars afraid of drowning?” asked Sam. “No,” said Stella. “They all learned how to swim.

The more naive your life the more frightening your dreams. Your unconscious will keep trying to wake you. In every sense. Imperilment is bottomless. As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared.

That there is little joy in the world is not just a view of things. Every benevolence is suspect. You finally figure out that the world does not have you in mind. It never did.

Your life is set upon you like a dog.

The elevation of grief to a status transcending that which it sorrows.

Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.

In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black Suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against.

I no longer have an opinion about reality. I used to. Now I dont. The first rule of the world is that everything vanishes forever. To the extent that you refuse to accept that then you are living in a fantasy.

I think what is being pointed out is that human consciousness and reality are not the same thing.

And it may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems.

I thought of my often-dream where Time poured the fishes into the sky and the sky was full of star fish; stella maris of the upper air.

Stella Maris Black River Falls, Wisconsin Established 1902 Since 1950 a non-denominational facility and hospice for the care of psychiatric medical patients.

There’s data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You dont know what’s down there if you havent been down there. Joy on the other hand hardly even teaches gratitude. A thoughtful silence.

I may doubt the truths of the world, but never again will I doubt whether or not the person that I am, or may be, is loved or worthy of love. I know myself, and I don’t. Both can be true. I am not Ophelia: daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes, lover of Hamlet. I am Ophelia Rojas: daughter of Miguel and Stella, best friend of Sammie and Agatha, aspirational lover to many, many boys and one girl. And I am so much more, just waiting to be discovered.

The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you’ve no way to escape you keep silent. If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing. When you’re defenseless you keep your opinions to yourself.

We're here on a need-to-know basis. There is no machinery in evolution for informing us of the existence of phenomena that do not affect our survival. What is here that we dont know about we dont know about.

Because I knew what my brother did not. That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasnt going away. And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.

So this was how it felt to be a walking dead man. Odd that it did not truly worry him. All was lost the moment he left her side. Nothing else had meaning. (Nicholas)

Well. I think maybe it’s harder to lose just one thing than to lose everything.

My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.

If you dont know what life is—and you dont—then I’m not sure how you would characterize the absence of it.

The simplest undertaking is predicated upon a future that has no warrant.

Do you think it would be easier to treat someone who was delusional or someone who only believed that she was?

Love is quite possibly a mental disorder itself.

Real trouble doesn't begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they never imagined.

The days are long but the years are short.

You shouldnt worry about what people think of you because they dont do it that often

If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose. When you solve a problem there is always the compelling sense that the solution was there and that you have discovered it.

If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be? It would be this: The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.

Talking is just recording what you’re thinking. It’s not the thing itself. When I’m talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I’m about to say. But it’s not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? There’s certainly no sense of some homunculus whispering to us the words we’re about to say. Aside from raising the spectre of an infinite regress—as in who is whispering to the whisperer—it raises the question of a language of thought. Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies

I thought that I would go to Romania and that when I got there I would go to some small town and buy secondhand clothes in the market. Shoes. A blanket. I’d burn everything I owned. My passport. Maybe I’d just put my clothes in the trash. Change money in the street. Then I’d hike into the mountains. Stay off the road. Take no chances. Crossing the ancestral lands by foot. Maybe by night. There are bears and wolves up there. I looked it up. You could have a small fire at night. Maybe find a cave. A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy.

Supposedly if you could think of nothing good to say about a dullard you would say that he was a good Christian. Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.

I think it's degrading of you, Flora,' cried Mrs Smiling at breakfast. 'Do you truly mean that you don't ever want to work at anything?' Her friend replied after some thought: 'Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as "Persuasion", but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say "Collecting material." No one can object to that. Besides, I shall be.' Mrs Smiling drank some coffee in silent disapproval. 'If you ask me,' continued Flora, 'I think I have much in common with Miss Austen. She liked everything to be tidy and pleasant and comfortable around her, and so do I. You see Mary,' - and here Flora began to grow earnest and to wave one finger about - 'unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes.

Why were we tortured? We were in love and life was a fast current swarming around our ankles, threatening to topple us into the wet part of the planet. It was intense, that's why we were tortured. It was enormous and exploding like palm tree. Iris was my Yuri-G, my Delilah, my Stella Marie. Strong dark women you had to love with a strong dark heart that throbbed in gorgeous pain because love is terrible. I mean, ultimately. It would go away like a needle lifting from the vinyl at the end of the song, we knew this. The music would cease, one of us would die or else we'd just break up, and this drove us to drink from each other like two twelve-year-olds sneaking vodka from the liquor cabinet, trying to get it all down, trying to get as fucked up as possible before we got caught.

and he also told me that I should rethink submitting my thesis. He read your thesis. He read three different drafts of it, actually. Did he understand it? Pretty much. He understood what was wrong with it. And that was? That nobody could understand it.

The next great war wont arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead. You think that nuclear war is inevitable. I agree with Plato that only the dead have seen an end to war. And people dont fight with rocks when they have guns. Etcetera and so on.

You dont know what antipsychotics are and you dont know how they work. Or why. All we have finally is the spectacle of tardive dyskinetics feeling their way along the wall. Jerking and drooling and muttering. Of course for those trekking toward the void there are waystations where the news will very suddenly become altogether bleaker. Maybe a sudden chill. There’s data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You dont know what’s down there if you havent been down there.

Milizia d'abisso perduta che vedi le navi dal basso come sagome nere di foglie, dimmi, in quelle ombre scorrenti tu sogni? In esse ricordi le navi che furono tue, tutte le tue navi fino all'ultima, la più detestata la più rimpianta? O a sognare ti basta il lusso dell'anemone, la geometria della stella marina, la dubbia parvenza delle creature di profondità?

All the ones I named are dead. Is that a requirement for greatness? It’s a requirement for not waking up tomorrow morning and saying something extraordinarily stupid.

The enemy of your undertaking is despair.

A friend once told me that those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished.

The next great war wont arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead.

And rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief,

People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you.

There's data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You dont know what's down there if you havent been down there.

The more naive your life the more frightening your dreams. Your unconscious will keep trying to wake you.

Well. I guess what I understand is that at the core of the world of the deranged is the realization that there is another world and that they are not a part of it.

So where does music come from?

There are remedies but there is no remedy. Sites that have been host to extraordinary suffering will eventually be either burned to the ground or turned into temples.

After the 1931 papers it was clear to him that we are capable of mathematical insights that a Universal Truth Machine is not.

The first rule of the world is that everything vanishes forever.

dont know. I know that you can make a good case that all of human sorrow is grounded in injustice. And that sorrow is what is left when rage is expended and found to be impotent.

I’d always had the idea that I didnt want to be found. That if you died and nobody knew about it that would be as close as you could get to never having been here in the first place.

And what do these categories signify? Where did they come from? What does it mean that they are two shades of blue? In my eyes. If music was here before we were, for whom was it here? Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music.

Some physicists suspect that the theory must eventually arrive at the understanding that the universe itself is a quantum phenomenon. That what quantum mechanics ultimately describes is the universe.

Women enjoy a different history of madness. From witchcraft to hysteria we're just bad news. We know that women were condemned as witches because they were mentally unstable but no one has considered the numbers - even few as they might be - of women who were stoned to death for being bright. That I havent wound up chained to a cellar wall or burned at the stake is not a testament to our ascending civility but to our ascending skepticism. If we still believed in witches we'd still be burning them.

You’re pretty much obliged to reckon that at the last suspiration the dying become not only acceptant of death but dedicated to it. That there must be some epiphany that makes it possible for even the dullest and most deluded of us to accept not only what is unacceptable but unimaginable. The absolute terminus of the world. Which will not wonder even for the briefest second what might have become of us.

At what age in a child’s life does rage become sorrow? I dont know. I dont think Piaget addresses the question. Or why. I think I know why. The injustice over which they are so distraught is irremediable. And rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief. At some point they get this.

That it’s caring that heals, not theory. Good the world over. And it may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems. As moonminded as Carl Jung was he was probably right about that. Keeping

The rage of children seemed inexplicable other than as a breach of some deep and innate covenant having to do with how the world should be and wasnt. I understood that their raw exposure to the world was the world.

The dream wakes us to tell us to remember. Maybe there’s nothing to be done. Maybe the question is whether the terror is a warning about the world or about ourselves. The night world from which you are brought upright in your bed gasping and sweating. Are you waking from something you have seen or from something that you are?

There seems to be a ceiling to well-being. My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.

If you have a patient with a condition that's not understood why not ascribe it to a disorder that is also not understood? Autism occurs in males more than it does in females. So does higher order mathematical intuition. We think: What is this about? Dont know. What is at the heart of it? Dont know. All I can tell you is that I like numbers. I like their shapes and their colors and their smells and the way they taste. And I dont like to take people's word for things.

The unconscious system of guidance is millions of years old, speech less than a hundred thousand. The brain had no idea any of this was coming. The unconscious must have had to do all sorts of scrambling around to accommodate a system that proved perfectly relentless. Not only it is comparable to a parasitic invasion, it’s not comparable to anything else.

Its general vacuity aside there seems to be a ceiling to well-being. My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.

Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules. Yet it's true that no one made them up. The rules. The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension. Music is not a language. it has no reference to anything other than itself

The world you live in is shored up by a collective of agreements. Is that something you think about? The hope is that the truth of the world somehow lies in the common experience of it. Of course the history of science and mathematics and even philosophy is a good bit at odds with this notion. Innovation and discovery by definition war against the common understanding. One should be wary.

Contemplating death is supposed to have a certain philosophical value. Palliative even. Trivial to say, but the best way to die well is to live well. To die for another would give your death meaning. Ignoring for the time being the fact that the other is going to die anyway.

Do not forsake the prayer of her Rosary; it binds you to her. Do not neglect the Ave Maris Stella and the other acts of love for her that she has asked of you or that the Holy Spirit has inspired you to offer her. Such little means are of immense, incalculable value in My eyes and in hers.

Animals might whimper if they're hungry or cold. But they dont start screaming. It's a bad idea. The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you've no way to escape you keep silent. If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing. When you're defenseless you keep your opinions to yourself.

[The unconscious has] been on its own for a long time. Of course it has no access to the world except through your own sensorium. Otherwise it would just labor in the dark. Like your liver. For historical reasons it's loath to speak to you. It prefers drama, metaphor, pictures. But it understands you very well. And it has no other cause save yours.

But music seemed to always stand as an exception to everything. It seemed sacrosanct. Autonomous. Completely self-referential and coherent in every part. If you wanted to describe it as transcendent we could talk about transcendence but we probably wouldnt get very far. I was deeply synesthetic and I thought that if music had an inherent reality—color and taste—that only a few people could identify, then perhaps it had other attributes yet to be discerned. The fact that these things were subjective in no way marked them as imaginary.

It has to do with intelligence. Yes. And again, when you’re talking about intelligence you’re talking about number. A claim that the mathless are quick to frown upon. It’s about calculation and the nature of calculation. Verbal intelligence will only take you so far. There is a wall there, and if you dont understand numbers you wont even see the wall. People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you. They will be cordial—or not—depending on their nature. Of course one might also add that intelligence is a basic component of evil. The more stupid you are the less capable you are of doing harm. Except perhaps in a clumsy and inadvertent manner. The word cretin comes from the French chrétien. Supposedly if you could think of nothing good to say about a dullard you would say that he was a good Christian. Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.

One of the things I realized was that the universe had been evolving for countless billions of years in total darkness and total silence and that the way that we imagine it is not the way that it was. In the beginning always was nothing. The novae exploding silently. In total darkness. The stars, the passing comets. Everything at best of alleged being. Black fires. Like the fires of hell. Silence. Nothingness. Night. Black suns herding the planets through a universe where the concept of space was meaningless for want of any end to it. For want of any concept to stand it against. And the question once again of the nature of that reality to which there was no witness. All of this until the first living creature possessed of vision agreed to imprint the universe upon its primitive and trembling sensorium and then to touch it with color and movement and memory. It made of me an overnight solipsist and to some extent I am yet.

My father didnt sleep before the bomb and he didnt sleep after. I think most of the scientists didnt give that much thought to what was going to happen. They were just having a good time. They all said the same thing about the Manhattan Project. That they'd never had so much fun in their lives. But anyone who doesnt understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasnt been paying attention. It's up there with fire and language. It's at least number three and it may be number one. We just dont know yet. But we will.

We’d walked on the beach the night before and there was a moon and a mock moon that rode in the rings and we talked about the paraselene and I said something to the effect that to speak of such things which are composed solely of light as problematic or perhaps as wrongly seen or even wrongly known or of questionable reality had always seemed to me something of a betrayal. He looked at me and he said betrayal? And I said yes. Things composed of light. In need of our protection. Then in the morning we sat in the sand and drank our tea and watched the sun come up.

Leonardo cant be explained. Or Newton, or Shakespeare. Or endless others. Well. Probably not endless. But at least we know their names. But unless you're willing to concede that God invented the violin there is a figure who will never be known. A small man who went with his son into the stunted forests of the little iceage of fifteenth century Italy and sawed and split the maple trees and put the flitches to dry for seven years and then stood in the slant light of his shop one morning and said a brief prayer of thanks to his creator and then–knowing this perfect thing–took up his tools and turned to its construction. Saying now we begin.