Quotes from Sue Prideaux

When I was twelve years old I conjured up for myself a marvelous trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My deduction was that God, thinking himself, created the second person of the godhead, but that to be able to think himself he had to think his opposite, and thus had to create it.—That is how I began to philosophize.

If you have your why? in life, you can get along with almost any how? People don't strive for happiness, only the English do.

musical dissonance must be the most effective artistic means of representing the pain of individual existence.

No one can construct for you the bridge on which you must cross the stream of life, no one but you alone.

Meaning must be found through saying "yes" to the divine accidents on the dance floor.

He is important for being the first writer to name the four elements:

Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.

It was uncanny how his thoughts had power over physical events. There were no coincidences anymore. He only had to think of a person for a letter to from them to arrive politely through the door.

To be alone, and without gods, this—this it is, is Death," Hölderlin puts into Empedocles's mouth in the play and maybe in this we can trace the first whisper of the gigantic tragedy that Nietzsche would articulate in the death of God.

The essay that follows, 'Why I Am so Clever,' plays on an obsession with his lungs and his stomach as central to the whole philosophical exercise. He becomes a diet-and-exercise guru. If you avoid coffee and live in dry air, you will attain health equal to his own. Odd that he bans coffee while delighting in the world-beating coffee of Turin.

Eminent doctors warned against Munch's Pointillist canvas, Spring Day on Karl Johan, counselling that looking at such pictures brought on spotty conditions such as acne, measles and chicken pox.

And, December 24, he collapsed, and three days later he lost consciousness. His weeks of recovery were not helped by his mother nagging him to keep up his Greek. He was beginning to admit to his friends that he did not like his mother and his sister's voice grated on his nerves. He was always ill when he was with them. He avoided quarrels and conflict; he felt he knew how to handle them but it did not agree with him to have to do so.

I distrust all systematisers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

autobiography is probably the most monstrous act of conceit that exists.

Are we happy? I am God, I have created this parody]

Strindberg himself was not at the greatest moment of mental stability in his life. He had no money, his first marriage to the wife he worshipped was crashing to disaster and they were living in a wing of a dilapidated castle overrun with peacocks and feral dogs and ruled over by a self-styled countess and her companion, a blackmailer, alchemist, magician and thief.

He visited Robert Schumann's grave to lay a wreath and he became so indebted by the purchase of a piano that he could not afford the journey home to his mother and sister at Christmas. Observing that his money always ran out fast, 'probably because it was so round', he sent in his place a volume of eight of his musical compositions...

Every true faith is indeed infallible; it performs what the believing person hopes to find in it, but it does not offer the least support for the establishing of an objective truth … Here the ways of men divide. If you want to achieve peace of mind and happiness, then have faith; if you want to be a disciple of truth, then search.'5