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I seem to be less depressed but also less hopeful now in my thirties. My widow's peak bothers me. I think a lot about the end of the human race. And so on.
Quentin S. Crisp
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Quentin S. Crisp
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Writer
Devonshire
Human
Hopeful
Humans
Bother
Think
Seem
Widow
Thinking
Race
Thirties
Less
Bothers
Ends
Widows
Also
Peak
Seems
Depressed
More quotes by Quentin S. Crisp
I do not think that my spiritual apprehensions are as dogmatically cultural as those of many people who have been brought up strictly in a particular tradition.
Quentin S. Crisp
If future history is not to be just one damned thing after another in space, then what we really have to do is in some way overcome this linear experience of time that makes all existence a quest for something that will never be found.And philosophies such as Zen seem to hint that this is possible.
Quentin S. Crisp
You focus on the here and now in order to escape existence forever and vanish into Nirvana. There is another religious impulse that is the opposite of this. It uses a world elsewhere in order to affirm life and give a reason to go forth and multiply.
Quentin S. Crisp
I'm not claiming anything like sainthood - merely a native perception.
Quentin S. Crisp
My muse can take the form of a landscape, an era, a style of writing, a piece of music, and, perhaps that which I find strangest of all for a muse, a human female. Of course, she's also adept at taking the form of toothless old Japanese men or young English lads with tattoos.
Quentin S. Crisp
The weird thing is, I'm not entirely sure that I am meant to think that such a gift is who I am according to the philosophy underlying Vedanta. But I have long been stubborn like that, for some reason. It's a gift, as I say.
Quentin S. Crisp
The peculiar thing is that, in focusing only on the here and now, Buddhism seems to despise the world.
Quentin S. Crisp
It's true that Eastern philosophy and religion were not unknown to me as a child, since my father has explored much in that area, and written books more or less in that area, too.
Quentin S. Crisp
I have a bit of a struggle with some aspects of or forms of Buddhism, but Zen I find to be mainly congenial.
Quentin S. Crisp
She [me muse] feels most at home in autumn, nonetheless, she is glad of the other seasons and loves them all. Without the others she would be unable to feel most at home in autumn, besides which, she almost feels most at home in all of them.
Quentin S. Crisp
I do have a muse. I am not sure how to describe her. She can be very elusive. She was born in England but has Mediterranean ancestry.
Quentin S. Crisp
As children in the seventies we were told about nebulous 'strangers'. By definition, we didn't know who these strangers were, and we didn't know what they wanted to do, but only that they were sinister. I think that was the stage the seventies were at.
Quentin S. Crisp
I'm constantly struggling with the futility and even sinfulness, from an antinatalist point of view, of creativity. And that struggle itself seems part of the creativity, though I sometimes suspect that it's nothing but a burden and an obstacle.
Quentin S. Crisp
There's a possible qualification I can make here about a non-pantheist god that is in some way tenable, and that is the idea of a god that has in some way discharged the universe from its own substance (I associate this with the word 'tzimtzum'), possibly even by a form of suicide - a suicide that might have been the Big Bang.
Quentin S. Crisp
I never went to church as a child. I did not .
Quentin S. Crisp
When we fail to live up to our ideals, for instance, we might begin to wonder who we are - most people are aware of a discrepancy, I think. There are idiosyncrasies and foibles, but we're not sure if these are essential. Some people think they are the most essential things of all.
Quentin S. Crisp
[Someone] said that what I described as the Buddhist voice - the life-denying voice of censure and guilt - sounded to him very much like a Catholic voice. This is, indeed, a mystery, and it intrigues me, too.
Quentin S. Crisp
Zen, on the other hand, is not so dogmatically sterile, though there are certainly traces and more than traces of this austerity. However, with Zen we have not only the void, but the fertile void. The ink lines in a sumi-e painting show this fertility of the void ever ready to brim over into existence.
Quentin S. Crisp
Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.
Quentin S. Crisp
We're all more or less interested in the 'swinging sixties', of course, but that's not what I mean. I'm interested in the particular naive glamour that clings to the post-war and pre-Hendrix era.
Quentin S. Crisp