The unfortunate person who has once gazed upon the ghastly ruins of Fatalism, knows no peace, but like the legend of Vineta, it will drag him down to misery and destruction.

Lydia Leavitt, Bohemian Society [Amazon, Amazon (Dodo Press), Bookshop (Dodo Press, Gutenberg, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Leavitt Bohemian Society unfortunate person gazed ghastly ruins Fatalism knows no peace legend Vineta drag down misery destruction

Consider also:

  1. “I don’t want to be high any more or again, and this sends me into a spiral of misery, life seems completely empty if this magic world is too painful for me. I want to die and I have infinite terror of the pain of every form of death. I see emptiness and hopelessness everywhere.”
  2. “That poem of Browning owes much of its haunting charm to this very circumstance, that the reader is never told who Childe Roland is, or why he wants to get to the Dark Tower, or what he expects to find when he does get there. There is a skillfully constructed atmosphere of Giants, and Ogres, and Hunchbacks, and the rest of the apparatus of fairy-tales; but there is no trace of the influence of Bædeker in the style. Now this is really very irritating to anybody who happens to be seriously concerned to get to that tower. I remember, as a boy, what misery I suffered over this poem. Had Browning been alive, I think I would have sought him out, so seriously did I take the Quest.”
  3. “I mean there was one buffet supper, but there was nobody moving around saying come on I want you to meet the Nobel prize winner or taking the Nobel prize winner and saying come on I want you to meet Albert Hoffmann. It didn’t seem to me that there was any attempt to cross these groups. So they were like strange weirdos and Austrian bureaucrats and never these groups came in contact with each other.”
  4. “This neither-neither I, shall transvalue ennui, fear, and all diseases to my wish. Dead is my misery in suffering! How could it exist in my Zodiac, unwilled?”
  5. “Listen, you! We expect nothing from you…we have burnt our hope as far as you are concerned…we want to speak to the ones who are prepared to stop eating their food. Misery is your food… scum-filth party politics is your food…when will you look down and see what is on the end of your fork – the naked lunch? We give up, you little people, your tenacity, your insistence on little wretched miseries amazes us. Stop reading this now. Because it is highly unlikely that you are one of those able to understand us.”