Shakespeare, King John

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

- Constance, ACT III, Sc IV

 

Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"

…
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
...

Noah Davis (painter)

I'd rather fail at painting than be successful at anything else.

Semi Chellas, "Fugue" (1986)

I think about the word "drunk". It is almost onomatopoeic: "drunk" is the sound you make, falling down from being drunk. 

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

     Sundays too my father got up early

     and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

     then with cracked hands that ached

     from labor in the weekday weather made

     banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

     I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

     When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

     and slowly I would rise and dress,

     fearing the chronic angers of that house,

     Speaking indifferently to him,

     who had driven out the cold

     and polished my good shoes as well.

     What did I know, what did I know

     of love's austere and lonely offices?

Galway Kinnell, “Wait”

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything if you have to.

But trust the hours. Haven't they

carried you everywhere, up to now?

Helene Cixous quoting Kafka in The Gagosian

HANS ULRICH OBRISTAre there any quotes you live by?

HÉLÈNE CIXOUSNo, but what comes to mind is "Man kann doch nicht nicht-leben" [One cannot not-live]. That's Kafka.

Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, their rules for living from an interview with her

OK, so the first one is: Don't be afraid of anyone. If you can imagine: living your life, you're not afraid of anyone. That's number one.

Number two is you get a really good bullshit detector, and you learn how to use it. You know, just: "Is that really happening or not?"

Third is to be really, really tender. And with those, you're covered.

Marshall McLuhan

• I wouldn't have seen it, if I didn't believe it. 

André Alexis, “Houyhnhnms”

Most great things take time to happen. So do catastrophe.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to Franz Xavier Kappus

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

"Didn't I read in the paper the other day where they finally found out what it was?"

"I missed that," I murmured.

"I saw that," said Sandra. "About two days ago."

"What is the secret of life?" I aksed.

"I forget," said Sandra.

"Protein," the bartender declared. "They found out something about protein."

"Yeah," said Sandra, "that's it."

Edna St Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

[via Austin Kleon]

Mary Oliver, "Don't Hesitate"

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that's often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

 

Goethe, Faust

I see my discourse leaves you cold;
Dear kids, I do not take offense;
Recall: the Devil, he is old,
Grow old yourselves, and he'll make sense!

Annie Ernaux, The Years

And one day we'll appear in our children's memories, among their grandchildren, and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history. 

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.

Anne Sexton, "Yellow"

When they turn the sun
on again I'll plant children
under it, I'll light up my soul
with a match and let it sing. I'll
take my bones and polish them, I'll
vacuum up my stale hair, I'll
pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up, I'll
feed myself spoonfuls of heat and
everyone will be home playing with
their wings and the planet will
shudder with all those smiles and
there will be no poison anywhere, no plague
in the sky and there will be a mother-broth
for all of the people and we will
never die, not one of us, we'll go on
won't we?
 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Vaclav Havel

The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul; it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Via Rebecca Solnit - Hope in the Dark

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Ted Chiang in the New Yorker

The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as "money laundering for copyrighted data," which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there's no guilt associated with it because it's not clear even to you that you're copying.

Philip Larkin

on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

John D. MacDonald, The Drowner

I was so low I could walk under a gator without taking off my hat.

Yael van de Woudon, The Safekeep

That's what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never find out anything new about them ever.

James Baldwin in Life Magazine, May 1963

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.

[via James Clear]

C.S.Lewis, The Four Loves

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. 

(via James Clear)

Ron Padgett, "The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World"

What makes us so mean?

We are meaner than gorillas,

the ones we like to blame our genetic aggression on.

It is in our nature to hide behind what Darwin said about survival,

as if survival were the most important thing on earth.

It isn't.

...

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Frida Kahlo, letter

Frankly, I don't have the least ambition to be anybody. I don't care for people's pretentiousness, and I am in no way interested in becoming a "big shit."

Frida Kahlo
Letter to Dr. Leo Eloesser
15th March 1941

—Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera, by Gerry Souter

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Language of the Night

We read books to find out who we are.

 

Arthur Weasley, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

David Simon, The Wire

Come at the king, you best not miss.
— Omar

June Leaf



Jane Leaf

Lynda Barry (via Austin Kleon)

Sometimes we are so confused and sad that all we can do is glue one thing to another. Use white glue and paper from the trash, glue paper onto paper, glue scraps and bits of fabric, have a tragic movie playing in the background, have a comforting drink nearby, let the thing you are doing be nothing, you are making nothing at all, you are just keeping your hands in motion, putting one thing down and then the next thing down and sometimes crying in between.

Irish/Celtic proverb

When God made time, he made plenty of it.

Nick Cave, "The Red Hand Files"

They are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of you, unable to get in…The song will find its way to you. If you don't write it, someone else will. Is that what you want? If not, get to it.

Daniel Kahneman

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

Alice Munro in the Paris Review, 1994

 The vigilance has to be there all the time. Of course it wouldn’t matter if you did give up writing. It’s not the giving up of the writing that I fear. It’s the giving up of this excitement or whatever it is that you feel that makes you write. This is what I wonder: what do most people do once the necessity of working all the time is removed? Even the retired people who take courses and have hobbies are looking for something to fill this void, and I feel such horror of being like that and having that kind of life. The only thing that I’ve ever had to fill my life has been writing.

Alice Munro, "Open Secrets"

 You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

Alice Munro, "Too Much Happiness"

 Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

Alice Munro, "Dance of the Happy Shades"

 The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity.

Alice Munro, "Lives of Girls and Women"

 “There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It's true. Was true. You will want to have children, though.”

-- Del's mother

Alice Munro, "Lives of Girls and Women"

 Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self - my old, devious, ironic, isolated self - beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.

Alice Munro, "Lives of Girls and Women"

I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.

Alice Munro, "Wenlock Edge"

 I had a mean tongue.

But I meant no harm. Or hardly any harm.

Alice Munro, "Face"

I am convinced that my father looked at me, really saw me, only once. After that, he knew what was there.

Alice Munro, "Some Women"

 I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinchers and crinolines that could stand up by themselves, and when there was nothing much to be done about things like polio and leukemia. Some people who got polio got better, crippled or not, but people with leukemia went to bed, and, after some weeks’ or months’ decline in a tragic atmosphere, they died.

Alice Munro, "The Spanish Lady" [first posted 2005]

 Why is it a surprise that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?