intoxicating QUOTES

25 " He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon. "

― Steven Millhauser , Little Kingdoms

27 " Why is it that a convict never saves his money? Well, not only is it difficult for him to keep it, but prison life is so miserable that a man, of his very nature, thirsts for freedom of action. His position in society makes him so irregular a being that the idea of swallowing up his capital in orgies, of intoxicating himself with revelry, seems to him quite natural if only he can procure himself one moment's forgetfulness. "

― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The House of the Dead

29 " Power always and everywhere had had a pernicious, corrupting effect upon men. It " converts a good man in private life to a tyrant in office." It acts upon men like drink: it " is known to be intoxicating in its nature" —" too intoxicating and liable to abuse." And nothing within man is sufficiently strong to guard against these effects of power—certainly not " the united considerations of reason and religion," for they have never " been sufficiently powerful to restrain these lusts of men. "

31 " Even the moon cannot escape your intoxicating charms... "

― Virginia Alison