Ecstasy of the desination Quotes

“You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery.”

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”

“Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”

“To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

“Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.”

“Let it shine, the light in you. Oh, and that's delighting me! Various colors shining through. Elated, it fills my soul with ecstasy.”

“Drink the ecstasy of life and write about it.”

“We want ecstasy as a way of life, not a liver-poisoning alcoholiday from it.”

“A man without mind brings ecstasy!”