“One has to be careful what one takes when one goes away forever.”
― The Hearing Trumpet
Sentimentality is a form of fatigue.
“People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.”
― The Hearing Trumpet
“Reason must know the heart’s reasons and every other reason”
“Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.”
― The Hearing Trumpet
Above: The Floor 4706th, by Leonora Carrington
“The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.”
“Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, & objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh & bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.”
― The Hearing Trumpet
“Do not give up hope entirely in spite of the horror of your situation. I am mobilising all my mental capacities to obtain your unconditional freedom.”
― The Hearing Trumpet
“The long tentacles of vision and understanding have withdrawn and all that is left to me is the ragged black hole of my loss. Loss and the world around. A noisy puzzle whose solution is another puzzle noisier and more stupid. The circle widens toward nothing.
The answer is hiding somewhere, if I could only read.”
― The Seventh Horse And Other Tales
“The full moon shone brightly between the trees, so I was able to see, a few yards in front of me, the origins of a distressing noise. It was two cabbages having a terrible fight. They were tearing each other’s leaves off with such ferocity that soon there was nothing but torn leaves everywhere and no cabbages.
“Never mind,” I told myself, “It’s only a nightmare.” But then I remembered suddenly that I’d never gone to bed that night, and so it couldn’t possibly be a nightmare. “That’s awful.”
― The Oval Lady, Other Stories: Six Surreal Stories
“Then it seemed that a cloud formed itself into an enormous bumble bee as big as a sheep. She wore a tall iron crown studded with rock crystals, the stars of the underworld.
All this may have been a collective hallucination although nobody has yet explained to me what a collective hallucination actually means.”
“I had a cup of tea, thought about my day and mostly about the horse whom, though I’d only known him a short time, I called my friend. I have few friends and am glad to have a horse for a friend. After the meal I smoked a cigarette and mused on the luxury it would be to go out, instead of talking to myself and boring myself to death with the same endless stories I’m forever telling myself. I am a very boring person, despite my enormous intelligence and distinguished appearance, and nobody knows this better than I. I’ve often told myself that if only I were given the opportunity, I’d perhaps become the centre of intellectual society. But by dint of talking to myself so much, I tend to repeat the same things all the time. But what can you expect? I’m a recluse.”
― House of Fear
Jay Snelling Art 