C. Lee Rogers

"Narcissism: ...The word alone sizzles like boiling acid, moans like molten lead, but ah my dear, it leaves the lips in such a sweetly murmuring hum" -CK Williams---"I sometimes get edgy / wonder where I'm at, / miss a step or two, feel / lost. // everybody I know seems / taller / more intelligent / kinder / than I am / and / of course / not as ugly. / but that mood never / lasts / very long. // I take a good / look around, / a straight / hard look around / and then / I know / better // but just / for a / while." -BUK----The tiny space I occupy is so small compared to the rest of space, where I am not and where things have nothing to do with me; and the amount of time in which I get to live my life is so insignificant compared to eternity, where I've never been and won't ever be...Yet in this atom this mathematical point blood circulates, a brain functions and desires something as well...How absurd! What nonsense! -Turgenev-----you and I may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime time icon in Hollywood, but...none of us is much more than a pimple on the a*s-end of creation, so let's not get carried away.
-Tom Robbins------I am a part of the part that at first was all, part of the darkness that gave birth to light, that supercilious light which now disputes with Mother Night her ancient rank and space, and yet can not succeed; no matter how it struggles, it sticks to matter and can't get free-Goethe-------[Hating America] would be as silly as loving it...It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.-Vonnegut--------I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience-Salinger---------There's a world of trouble/Trying to take its turn/I can hear it shaking underground/And half a dozen lessons/I might never learn/Not until them troubles come around-Gillian Welch----------I feel that nothing can befal me in life,-no disgrace,no calamity, which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,-my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,-all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God...I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.-Emerson-----------I've been scarred and battered. / My hopes the wind done scattered. / Snow has friz me, sun has baked me. / Looks like between 'em / They done tried to make me / Stop laughin', stop lovin', stop livin'- / But I don't care! / I'm still here!-Hughes------------When I take a long look at my life, as though from outside, it does not appear particularly happy. Yet I am even less justified in calling it unhappy, despite all its mistakes. After all, it is foolish to keep probing for happiness or unhappiness, for it seems to me it would be hard to exchange the unhappiest days of my life for all the happy ones. If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless. Even if, as it is decreed by the gods, fate has inexorably trod over my external existence as it does with everyone, my inner life has been of my own making . I deserve its sweetness and bitterness and accept full responsibility for it. -Hesse