[P]hilosophy is the art of masking inner torments.
— Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair. (University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition October 1, 1996) Originally published 1933.
Emil M. Cioran — The Vale of Soul-Making
Johnny Knoxville — The Vale of Soul-Making
Honestly, you just take a deep breath and say fuck it.
— Johnny Knoxville
Johnny Knoxville — The Vale of Soul-Making
Hélène Cixous — The Vale of Soul-Making
I have flowed, become stagnant, festered, I have fallen from above. Mass, rhythmic, in harmony with my millions of drops, I have rained. I have been earth with the earths. Foaming, humid, I have slept a faceless face down. I have. Had. Lived. Done. Been. All the words that grow before the tip of the tongue, before I reach it. I am a body who has enjoyed creation.
— Hélène Cixous, White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism). Published by Columbia University Press; 1 edition (November 6, 2008)
Hélène Cixous — The Vale of Soul-Making
E.E. Cummings — The Vale of Soul-Making
into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness,friends
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight
i smilingly
glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swim,sayingly;
(Do you think?)the
i do,world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of solongs and,ashes)
— E.E. Cummings, ” [into the strenuous briefness],” 100 Selected Poems (Grove Press January 10, 1994) Originally published 1954.
William Ernest Henley
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley (1875) Published 1888.
Paul Valéry — The Vale of Soul-Making
Love is being stupid together. – Paul Valéry
F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Vale of Soul-Making
I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned. (Charles Scribner’s Sons 1922)
F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Vale of Soul-Making
Julia Kristeva — The Vale of Soul-Making
When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.
— Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. (Columbia University Press; Reprint edition April 15, 1982)
Julia Kristeva — The Vale of Soul-Making
Philip Larkin — The Vale of Soul-Making
Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses:
To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget,
That there is always a changing at the root,
And a real world in which time really passes.
— Philip Larkin, from “New Year Poem,” Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)
Tom Waits — The Vale of Soul-Making
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. – Tom Waits
Naked Cities Journal 
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