#spirits

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes. ↗

— e. e. cummings

#amazing #blue #day #dream #everything

Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#calcutta #chronicle-of-the-past #darkness #generations #ghosts

I cannot but think that it would be a great step if mankind could familiarise themselves with the idea that they are spirits incorporated for a time in the flesh re spirits incorporated for a time in the flesh. ↗

— Catherine Crowe

#could #flesh #great #great step #i

He was one of those inexplicable gifts of nature, an artist who leaps over boundaries, changes our nervous systems, creates a new language, transmits new kinds of joy to our startled senses and spirits. ↗

— Jack Kroll

#boundaries #changes #creates #gifts #inexplicable

People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#ancestral #another #find #form #however

To sum up: all nature-spirits are not the same as fairies; nor are all fairies nature-spirits. The same applies to the relationship of nature-spirits and the dead. But we may safely say that a large proportion of nature-spirits became fairies, while quite a number of the dead in some areas seem to take on the character of nature-spirits. We cannot expect any fixity of rule in dealing with barbaric thought. We must take it as it comes. It bears the same relationship to "civilized" or folk-lore theory as does the growth of the jungle to a carefully designed and meticulously labelled botanical garden. As Victor Hugo once exclaimed when writing of the barbaric confusion which underlies the creative function in poetry: 'What do you expect? You are among savages! ↗

— Lewis Spence

#fairies #fairy #nature-spirit #spirits #victor-hugo

Shahid was the free spirit of the Kamal family: a dreamer, an idealist, a wanderer on the face of the earth--or, as Ahmed would put it, a lazy fuckwit. ↗

— John Lanchester

#families #free-spirits #idealists #laziness #wanderers

Like a great fool, I went ashore with them, and they gave me some cursed stuff they called gin, - such blasphemy I never heard! At first when they told me they had set up a great distillery of gin, I thought them very useful, clever, good men; for you know, captain, any nation might be converted by hollands; -but this was the unchristianest beastliest liquor I ever tasted, and it made me - as I feel now. Yet the foolish, idiot-people of the island think it very good, because it makes them mad-drunk, and they believe Heaven sent it; but it made me believe the devil had got amongst them. ↗

— Edward John Trelawny

#gin #spirits #men

I don't know about Heaven or Hell, but I do know that we are visited all the time by the spirits of those who affected us in life. ↗

— Mitch Albom

#affected #heaven #hell #i #i do

There is this stereotype of Icelanders all believing in spirits, and I've played up to that a bit in interviews. ↗

— Bjork

#bit #i #interviews #played #spirits