I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a sense of feeling detached from reality and experiencing a profound yearning.
In this quote, William S. Burroughs explores themes of alienation and desire. The imagery of projecting oneself as a 'ghost' suggests a disconnection from the physical world and a longing that is both intense and unsettling. It captures the complexity of human feelings and the often-overlapping experiences of longing versus existence within a vibrant, yet fleeting reality.
In practice
This quotation can be used in a discussion about existential philosophy.
God save the Queen and a fascist regime β¦ a flabby toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top. The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire
Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.
There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.
Gentle reader, the Fountain of Youth is radioactive, and those who imbibe its poisonous heavy waters will suffer the hideous fate of decaying metal. Yet almost without exception, the wretched idiot inhabitants of our benighted planet would gulp down this radioactive excrement if it were offered.
Language is a virus from outer space.
One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and donβt know they know... Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough... So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.
...What you are is a force--a force that makes it possible for your body to live, a force that makes it possible for your whole mind to dream...You are life
The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost.
Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman._x000D_ There is not even a rope to tow the boat, and no one to pull it._x000D_ There is no earth, no sky, no time, no thing, no shore, no ford!
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
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