“Nothing would thrill Hannibal more than to see this roof collapse mid-Mass, packed pews, choir singing. He would just love it. And he thinks God would love it, too.”
Lorenzo Ghiberti, Gates of Paradise (East Doors) for the Baptistery of San Giovanni (Florence, Italy), 1425-52
Love is choosing, the snake said.
The kingdom of god is within you
because you ate it.
– Margaret Atwood, Quattrocento (via lachantefleurie)
What mysteries remain to be revealed in the nervous system, that web of structures both material and ethereal, that network of threads that runs throughout the body, composed of a thousand Ariadne’s clues, all leading to the brain, that shadowy central den where the human bones lie scattered and the monsters lurk…
The angels, also, he reminds himself. Also the angels.
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (via klytemnestre)
The saints cannot distinguish
between being with other people and being
alone: another good reason for becoming one.They live in trees and eat air.
Staring past or through us, they see
things which we would call not there.
We on the contrary see them.They smell of old fur coats
stored for a long time in the attic.
When they move they ripple.
Two of them passed here yesterday,
filled and vacated and filled
by the wind, like drained pillows
blowing across a derelict lot,
their twisted and scorched feet
not touching the ground,
their feathers catching in thistles.
What they touched emptied of colour.Whether they are dead or not
is a moot point.
Shreds of them litter history,
a hand here, a bone there:
is it suffering or goodness
that makes them holy,
or can anyone tell the difference?Though they pray, they do not pray
for us. Prayers peel off them
like burned skin healing.
Once they tried to save something,
others or their own souls.
Now they seem to have no use,
like the colours on blind fish.
Nevertheless they are sacred.They drift through the atmosphere,
their blue eyes sucked dry
by the ordeal of seeing,
exuding gaps in the landscape as water
exudes mist. They blink
and reality shivers.
Margaret Atwood, The Saints (via lipstickmata)
All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.
Joseph Campbell (via elucipher)