Some of my favorite books & films (an abbreviated list in no particular order - I'll add more as time permits):

• W. B. Yeats- If I had to choose a favorite poet, Yeats would be it.



• Griffin and Sabine, by Nick Bantock - A beautifully illustrated series about a mysterious love affair conducted via hand-written correspondence.



• Mount Analogue by Rene Daumal- During a visit with a college friend (a fellow Antiochian) over New Year's 1980, I stumbled across this title while perusing a bookshop in Boston's Harvard Square. It was one of those works that call out to you from the shelf, and though I'd never even heard of its author I was drawn to buy it. To this day passages like the one a few paragraphs below still ring through my mind when the circumstances apply.
  
  As sub-titled, Mount Analogue is "a novel of symbolically authentic non-euclidean adventures in mountain climbing", which is to say it's a story about spiritual growth told in the guise of a fable. The author, Daumal, was a disciple of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff, and Mount Analogue was his last book. Eerily, the book was never finished. Daumal died young, at age 35, in the middle of writing it in fact, and the book ends literally in mid-sentence. Peppered with pearls of wisdom, here's one of my favorites:

"We all knew only too well that vile creature of intellectual cupidity, and each of us had his own owl to nail to the door along with a few chattering magpies, parading turkey-cocks, cooing doves, and geese, lots of fat geese! But all those creatures are so securely anchored, grafted so deeply into our flesh, that we cannot cast them away without tearing out our very insides. We had to go on living with them for a long time, enduring them, coming to know them, until they fell from us as the scabs of an eruptive disease come off, of themselves, when the system becomes healthy again. It is damaging to rip them off prematurely."

• The Pheadrus by Plato - This was required reading for a college english course 20 years ago, and to be honest, I don't remember much about the book except that a particular part of the dialogue -- a point that Socrates makes, which I can't find now (argh!) -- struck me with an unforgettable awe.



• Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton - Sarton was recommended to me many, many years ago by a friend, and I've recently become reacquainted with the author's work, mostly her personal journals, of which this is one. An especially resonant passage:

"I have waited, sometimes for years, for someone who did not come, whether human or angel. But part of the quality of my life here has been the waiting itself ..."

• The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda - This one initially caught my interest because I kept a dream diary for several years. Most memorable passage:

"Don Juan had given me very detailed and explicit instructions about the recapitulation. It consisted of reliving the totality of one's life experiences by remembering every possible minute detail of them. He saw the recapitulation as the essential factor in a dreamer's redefinition and redeployment of energy. 'The recapitulation sets free energy imprisoned within us, and without this liberated energy dreaming is not possible.' That was his statement."

• Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem - the movie. Thought provoking. Favorite quotes: "There are no answers, only choices" along with copious references to the Dylan Thomas poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion

In contrast to the Castaneda quote above:
"...memories were meant to fade. They're designed that way for a reason."
-Mace from the movie Strange Days