F Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

 The charm of knowledge would be small, were it not so much shame has to be overcome on the way to it.

Louise Gluck, “A Slip of Paper”

To get born, your body makes a pact with death,  

and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat—    

You get into bed alone. Maybe you sleep, maybe you never wake up.  

But for a long time you hear every sound.  

It's a night like any summer night; the dark never comes.   

Louise Gluck, “A Slip of Paper”

No one taught me how to care for my body.  

You grow up watched by your mother or grandmother.  

Once you're free of them, your wife takes over, but she's nervous,  

she doesn't go too far. So this body I have,  

that the doctor blames me for—it's always been supervised by women,  

and let me tell you, they left a lot out.

Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (after Sophocles)

[…]

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

WH Auden, September 1, 1939



I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Siri Hustvedt, The Delusions of Certainty

We are born of someone, but we do not die in pairs. 

Reverend Lovejoy to Ned Flanders in The Simpsons (S8, E8, written by Steve Young)

Ned Flanders: Reverend, I need to know - is God punishing me?

Reverend Lovejoy: Oooohh… Short answer, 'yes' with an 'if'. Long answer 'no' with a 'but'.