Arca Quotes

Beauty and fear make uneasy companions

...but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.

A spoonful of hope and a cup of despair

Really, when you look at it, you're not battling the chemo, you're battling yourself the whole time. It was me versus me. There were many times where I didn't know if I would wake up tomorrow. I would just be up, scared to go to sleep.

Every day, I walk the streets with my head held high, but deep down inside, sometimes I'm like, 'I just hope I can get through the day.'

No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.

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’m torn between the desire to create and the desire to destroy.

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.

He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure.

Hope and despair ignore one another's cries.

My day-mind can endure / Upright, in hope, all it must undergo. / But O, afraid, unsure, / My night-mind waking lies too low, too low.

I am gay on the outside, especially among my own folk (I count Poles my own); but inside something gnaws at me; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams - or sleeplessness - melancholy, indifference - desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death; some kind of sweet peace, some kind of numbness, absent-mindedness.

The distance runner is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace unique; the everyday eternal.

You have to have fear in order to have courage.

Only one thing bothered me: at this very moment, as they say, of inexplicable bliss there would be a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach and my abdomen would be assailed by a melancholy, cold shivering. In the end I couldn't abide such happiness and ran away.

I'd be smiling if I wasn't so desperate. I'd be patient if I had the time.

Misery is what happiness rests upon. Happiness is what misery lurks beneath.

The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.

For many years my acting came from a place of surmounting some enormous obstacle, confronting some stern and faceless judge who would condemn me to a pit of hell if I didn't achieve the "zone," if even for a moment. Not a particularly happy place to work from.

The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up.

I could see her get all nervous but she was also excited. Nightmares have that quality, don't they?

In a very unscientific statement, I feel that there's been a disconnect between this clever brain and the heart.

I think I must be worried all the time - maybe that is the other side of joy, you know, holding that line of the full range of emotions.

How can so much beauty hide such a bruised and steely heart, and why must I love him, why must I lean in my weariness upon his irresistible yet indomitable strength? Is he not the wizend funeral spirit of a dead man in a child's clothes?