Georges Bataille Quotes

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

I do not have easy days at home now and I drift between fear and helplessness in sunny rooms where it is unspeakably cold. Strange shudders of transformation, bodily experienced to the point of vulnerability, visions of mysteries until the certainty of having died, ecstasies to the point of stony petrifaction, and a continuation of dreaming sad dreams.

Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.

Would you please tell me what you are thinking? Before I go mad?

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul. God keep me, if only for the sake of those dear to me!

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?

Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!

I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, it could be that I've lost my way.

Why can I never go back to bed? Who's is the voice ringing in my head? Where is the sense in these desperate dreams? Why should I wake when I'm half past dead?

The pain of not knowing what to do was exceeded only by that of knowing what I had done.

You know how I get angry sometimes? That's because it's the only way I can still feel. And I need to test myself, to make sure I'm really here.

Into the mercy seat I climb My head is shaved, my head is wired And like a moth that tries To enter the bright eye I go shuffling out of life Just to hide in death awhile And anyway I never lied.

Acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times, you really have no idea where you are going or even where the path lies. A the same time, you can very well know something about where you are now (even if it is knowing that you are lost, confused, enraged or without hope).

What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

But now my problems had been set loose. They could be anywhere at any time and I was just like everyone else I knew: almost positive that there was something profoundly and undiagnosably wrong with me.

...crushed between the fears of going forward and the dread of going back.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?

I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?

Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer.

He felt that he was still groping in the dark; he had chosen his path but kept looking back, wondering whether he had misread the signs, whether he should not have taken the other way.