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Quote by Mark Vonnegut

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The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

This memoir offers an intimate look into the author's life, exploring his struggles with mental illness and his interactions with the psychiatric system. It provides a candid account of his experiences, offering insight into the challenges faced by individuals with mental health issues. more

Author

Mark Vonnegut
Mark Vonnegut

Mark Vonnegut, born on May 11, 1947, is an American memoirist known for his works that often explore themes of family, history, and the meaning of human existence through personal experiences. more

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“Gerard Manley Hopkins somewhere describes how he mesmerized a duck by drawing a line of chalk out in front of it. Think of me as the duck; the chalk, softly wearing itself away against the tiny pebbles embedded in the corporate concrete, is Joyce's forward-luring rough-smooth voice on the cassettes she gives me. Or, to substitute another image, since one is hardly sufficient in Joyce's case, when I let myself really enter her tape, when I let it surround me, it is as if I'm sunk into the pond of what she is saying, as if I'm some kind of patient, cruising amphibian, drifting in black water, entirely submerged except for my eyes, which blink every so often. Each word comes floating up to me like a thick, healthy lily pad and brushes past my head.”

“One could say that Hopkins practiced transubstantiation in every poem. By mysterious talent, he changed plain element into reality sublime. He encountered a jumble of weather, birds, trees, branches, waters, blooms, dewdrops, candle flames, prayers, then instressed them and, delighted, wrote in his journal, 'Chance left free toact falls into an order.”

“The Incarnation of Christ raised the energy of everything. And when Hopkins placed his conviction of this into poetry, he tended to mention electricity, lightening, fire, flash, flame. He wrote in his late, great poem, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the comfort of the Resurrection": 'In a flash, at a trumpet crash, / I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am and / This jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond.”

“The innate problem of humankind is the inability to find equilibrium. Equanimity and equilibrium. These are what humans cannot seem to attain. Honour without soul will lead to destruction. Soul without honour will lead to destruction. But humans cannot seem to understand this. Or understand the state of equilibrium in anything at all! All honour and no passion is death. All passion and no honour is death. This is why people always die. Because everyone is always running to either extreme end of the pendulum. Everybody wants to be all black or all white. Who is a balanced man? Bring him to me! I will have found a unicorn!”