The pleasure which escapes them changes itself for them into a long irritation and desire. The more murderous are their excesses, the more it seems to them that supreme happiness is at hand. … One more bumper of strong drink, one more spasm, one more violence done to Nature… Ah! at last, here is pleasure; here is life … and their desire, in the paroxysm of its insatiable hunger, extinguishes itself for ever in death.
Éliphas Lévi, trans Aleister Crowley, Liber XLVI The Key of the Mysteries
I’m a master now, an idea transcended into life. And so this is my new path, which is a lot like the old one, but mine. To stay on that path, I need to work harder, explore new rituals, evolve. Am I evil? Am I good? I’m done asking those questions. I don’t have the answers.
Daniel Cerone, Dexter [Amazon, Showtime], s02e12, “The British Invasion”
I was more pretending to work than I was actually getting much done.
T Thorn Coyle, Bookshop Witch [Amazon, Bookshop]
I crave the small, tactile simplicity of my new Kindle Paperwhite in its purple leather cover, which is currently home to what would make up around three boxes of physical books, but whose screen’s digital imprint is flattened of all memory and association. It’s soulless and almost weightless. On the other hand, the smug little ereader has not broken my spirit and my knees in the way that disposing of half my library has done, driving me to tears, rage and paracetamol.
Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library [Amazon]
Humanity needs to go into a Dark Age for a few hundred years and think about what it’s done.
Jack Donovan, The Way of Men
