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Quote by Elizabeth Bedlam

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On Human Hearts and Hog Parts

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Elizabeth Bedlam

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“He had seen dogs and ponies feverishly coupling with bored young girls, and overfed women with rats and mice crawling across their brown bare skin, and felt nothing; but at the sight of vertebrae pushing against the back of her neck, pushing between her perfectly symmetrical shoulder blades as she inclined her head forward, brow furrowed, his mouth went dry, and he felt the planet sliding beneath his feet.”

LoveMadnessAddiction
Book:Monsters in a Mirror: Strange Tales from the Chapel Perilous
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“First: breakdown, impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or, more exactly, the course of life. The clocks are not in unison; the inner one runs crazily on at a devilish or demoniac or in any case inhuman pace, the outer one limps along at its usual speed. What else can happen but that the two worlds split apart, and they do split apart, or at least clash in a fearful manner. There are doubtless several reasons for the wild tempo of the inner process; the most obvious one is introspection, which will suffer no idea to sink tranquilly to rest but must pursue each one into consciousness, only itself to become an idea, in turn to be pursued by renewed introspection. Secondly: this pursuit, originating in the midst of men, carries one in a direction away from them. The solitude that for the most part has been forced on me, in part voluntarily sought by me –but what was this if not compulsion too? –is now losing all its ambiguity and approaches its dénouement. Where is it leading? The strongest likelihood is, that it may lead to madness; there is nothing more to say, the pursuit goes right through me and rends me asunder. Or I can –can I? –manage to keep my feet somewhat and be carried along in the wild pursuit. Where, then, shall I be brought? ‘Pursuit,’ indeed, is only a metaphor. I can also say, ‘assault on the last earthly frontier’, an assault, moreover, launched from below, from mankind, and since this too is a metaphor, I can replace it by the metaphor of an assault from above, aimed at me from above.”

SolitudeMadnessPursuitContradictionIntrospectionInsomniaBreakdownDiaryInner Conflict
Book:Diaries, 1910-1923
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“Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence? It has been said also that silence is torture, capable of goading to madness the man who is condemned to it in a prison cell. But what an even greater torture than that of having to keep silence it is to have to endure the silence of the person one loves!”

SilenceCommunicationMadnessTortureBarriers
Book:The Guermantes Way
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