Joseph Duncan · 270 pages
Rating: (725 votes)
“In a culture that worshipped its ancestors, to die without offspring was next of kin to damnation.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I believed in the spirits of my ancestors.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“No child is ever loved as they are loved by the ones who gave them life.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I have always found it both bitter and sweet that men become childlike in their old age.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“I have visited a great many cathedrals and have yet to burst into flames.”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“We worshiped our ancestors. We believed in the spirits of men and animals,”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“Sometimes I think it is that loneliness that drove our species a little bit insane. Why else would we have invented such a vast assortment of preposterous characters, all those pantheons of mad gods and uncountable legions of angels and devils and supernatural dream-things, if not to fill the void”
― Joseph Duncan, quote from The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
“But Jasmine knew that everyone was evil, down deep when you scrape the skin away. Inside their heads everyone hunted, everyone killed, everyone was a monster.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from Strange Candy
“I had before me an object lesson, I thought: two ways to face the world. One way as embodied by this old woman—simple, unassuming, a kind of peasant dignity, a naturalness inherent in her every move. The other, exemplified by the girl—smartness, sophistication, veneer without substance. I was conscious that I have now opted for the old woman’s way, have thrown in my lot with a creature I would have jeered at a year ago. My present trip to the mountains is indeed a trip to that wellspring of naturalness she symbolized. And I admired my choice: the correct choice, the only choice for a sensitive and moral man in my dilemma.”
― Lee Smith, quote from Oral History
“The fruit of the Spirit is not spouse control or staff control or environmental control; it is self-control (see Gal. 5:23).”
― Neil T. Anderson, quote from Victory Over the Darkness
“I want for people not to worry so much. Life ain't going to be perfect, but tings will work out. People come to visit and I always tell them not to worry. If you got something to eat, don't worry, be grateful. Just look at all those books. Those books aren't about food. They're to do with worrying about food.”
― quote from Life is So Good
“A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the “class struggle”.
What I am saying concerning mysticism, gnosis, magic and philosophy would be considered by him only as a ruse on the part of the bourgeois class, with the aim of “screening with a mystical and idealistic haze” the reality of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie…although I have not inherited anything from my parents and I have not experienced a single day without having to earn my living by means of work recognised as “legitimate” by Marxists!
Another contemporary example of possession by a system is Freudianism. A man possessed by this system will see in everything that I have written only the expression of “suppressed libido”, which seeks and finds release in this manner. It would therefore be the lack of sexual fulfillment which has driven me to occupy myself with the Tarot and to write about it!
Is there any need for further examples? Is it still necessary to cite the Hegelians with their distortion of the history of humanity, the Scholastic “realists” of the Middle Ages with the Inquisition, the rationalists of the eighteenth century who were blinded by the light of their own autonomous reasoning?
Yes, autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession. Their physical analogy is cancer.”
― quote from Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism
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