February 2012
21 posts
Charles Dickens, from 'Great Expectations'
Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all), she repeated, “Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!”
Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her utterance of...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
“Our embrace lasted too long.
We loved right down to the bone.
I hear the...”
– Anna Świrszczyńska, from “I’ll Open the Window,” trans. Milosz and Nathan (via proustitute)
Robert Hass, from 'Meditation at Lagunitas'
There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because...
Letters of Note: from Iggy Pop
“i read the whole fucking thing, dear. of course, i’d love to see you in your black dress and your white socks too. but most of all i want to see you take a deep breath and do whatever you must to survive and find something to be that you can love.”
Iggy Pop to a fan.
Marilynne Robinson, from 'Gilead' (2)
In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we...
Marilynne Robinson, from 'Gilead'
These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.
Vladimir Nabokov
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
Zadie Smith, from 'On Beauty'
And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
Stephanie Saldana
Your absence is the name of the sea in someone else’s language.
Billy Collins, 'Vade Mecum'
I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.
Virginia Woolf, from 'Mrs. Dalloway'
And the supreme mystery … was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
Joyce Carol Oates
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
Florence Foster Jenkins
Florence Foster Jenkins pursued her lifelong dream to sing and became famous for her “complete lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, and overall singing ability” (Wikipedia). Incredibly popular for the amusement she provided her audience, Foster Jenkins dismissed their laughter as “professional jealousy.”
With regard to her critics, she said:
“People may say I can’t...
James Joyce, from 'A Painful Case'
This union exalted him, wore away the rough edges of his character, emotionalised his mental life. Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own,...
Anne Carson, from 'Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions'
My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover, the greenness of love.
Vladimir Nabokov, from 'Strong Opinions'
To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
George Orwell, from '1984'
He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have...
Stephen Dunn, from 'Ars Poetica'
Maybe from the beginning
the issue was how to live
in a world so extravagant
it had a sky,
in bodies so breakable
we had to pray.
oh hello.
hey everyone, I’m back. I missed you.