“Not only were the media bombarding us all the time with talk about the terrorist threat; this threat was also obviously libidinally invested — just remember the series of movies from Escape from New York to Independence Day. That is the rationale of the often-mounted association of the attacks with Hollywood disaster movies: the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise.”
- Slavoj Žižek (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso, p. 15. ISBN 1859844219

“For myself, and I was not alone, all the conscious and recollected years of my life have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.
In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.”

• From Flowering Judas, Introduction to Modern Library edition (1940)

Via Katherine Anne Porter Wikiquote

“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
- From Twenty Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems: Interviews by Roberto Alifano, 1981–1983 (1984)

Via Jorge Luis Borges Wikiquote

“The voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.” - Katherine Anne Porter

“Follow the light that glows 
Through your bedroom window. 
Tonight, tonight, the fading twilight. 
There’s a hollow deep in the woods 
Where you know you’re crazy 
To go, to go, not even meant to know 
There are…

Pictures in the dark, I see all around. 
Voices calling underground 
And I’m watching the stars since the 
World was found.

One, two, three.

[ Chorus ]

Pictures in the dark, I see 
Morpheus comes to me. 
Pictures in the dark, I see. 
Aurora sets you free.

And in the deepest dark 
You come to a maze in. 
The night, the night, the fading twilight. 
And you shiver the glistening path 
Where you know you’re crazy 
To go, to go, not even meant to know. 
There are…

Pictures in the dark, I see all around. 
Voices calling underground 
And I’m watching the stars since the 
World was found.

One, two, three.

Lost in my dreams.

This night will never end. 
You can only fly in your dreams. 
Midnight will be your friend. 
Drift away on starlight beams. 
Clocks are ticking the night away. 
You can only fly until dawn ascends.

[ Repeat Chorus ]

The moon shines starlight beams 
And you’ll be flying in your dreams.

[ Repeat Chorus ]

The moon shines starlight beams 
And you’ll be flying in your dreams.”

“Love me for love’s sake, that evermore thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.”

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning