Vincent Van Gogh, Letter to Theo

My dear Theo,
Thanks for your letter, thanks for the enclosure. Now listen here.
[…]
I tell you, if one wants to be active, one mustn't be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good — many people think that they'll achieve it by doing no harm — and that's a lie, and you said yourself in the past that it was a lie. That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
You don't know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can't do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of 'you can't'.
Life itself likewise always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas.
But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn't let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs on to that, in short, breaks, 'violates' — they say.
Let them talk, those cold theologians.
Yours truly, 
Vincent

Ori Elon, creator of Shtisel

The longing for the dead and, no less, the longing for the living. The unbridgeable distance that always exists between any two people, between family members, between loved ones. The distance between man and God, and also the unbridgeable distance within man himself — between the mind and the heart. In the third season, the feeling of loss and longing is even more acute

Raymond Chandler

I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

Notes by Octavia Butler

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours

You love most of all those who need you 
as they need a crowbar or a hoe. 
You have not grown old, and it is not too late 
To dive into your increasing depths 
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

Kate Baer, “Motherload”

...

She keeps an office in her sternum, the flat
bone in the center of her chest with all its
urgent papers, vast appointments, lists of
minor things. In her vertebrae she holds more
carnal tasks: milk jugs, rotten plants, heavy-
bottomed toddlers in all their mortal rage.

T. E. Lawrence

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

 

 

James Baldwin, “Me and My House”

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Leo Tolstoy

Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

Annie Dillard

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

Sean & Abigail Bengson "The Keep Going On Song"

I pray my rage is fire & it cleans my mind out
so I can listen…
we don't know we don't know we are making this up as we go

Stanley Plumly, "At Night"

When did I know that I'd have to cary it around
in order to have it when I need it, say in a pocket

the dark itself not dark enough but needing to be
added to, handful by handful if necessary, until

the way my mother would sit all night in a room
without the lights, smoking, until she disappeared?

...

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Phillip Larkin, "Days"

What are days for?

Days are where we live.   

They come, they wake us   

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:   

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor   

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

Malcolm Gladwell

The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.

De Medicina – Aulus Cornelius Celsus c25 B.C – 50 A.D.

Live in rooms full of light.  Avoid heavy food.  Be moderate in drinking of wine.  Take massage, baths, exercise and gymnastics.  Fight insomnia with gentle rocking or the sound of running water.  Change surroundings and take long journeys.  Strictly avoid frightening ideas.  Indulge in cheerful conversation and amusements.  Listen to music

Rebecca Traister, "The Only Strategy Left for Democrats"

It is not nefarious to make people's lives better in the hope that they will keep you in power so that you can continue to make their lives better: that's actually a healthy view of how a government and its people might ideally operate.

Father Daniel Berrigan on Dorothy Day

She lived as though the truth were true.

Gertude Stein

Everybody gets so much information all day that they lose their common sense.

Hieu Minh Nguyen, "The New Decade"

…

If you were here we'd dance, I think.

If you were here, you'd know what to do

what to do with all this time

Horace, Odes I, ii, "How to Live" (65-8 BC)

Don't waste your time, Leucónoe, living in fear and hope
of the imprevisible future; forget the horoscope.
Accept whatever happens. Whether the gods allow
us fifty winters more or drop us at this one now
which flings the high Tyrrhenian waves on the stone piers,
decant your wine; the days are more fun than the years
which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest
one day at a time, and never mind the rest.

Phillip Larkin

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

David Byrne, “This Must Be the Place”

We drift in and out
Sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view

Suzanne Moore

I was always somehow inappropriate. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas said, dirt is "matter out of place". Matter out of place. 

Joan Didion, “On Self Respect”

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

Sharon Olds, "35/10"

Brushing out my daughter's dark
silken hair before the mirror
I see the gray gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a small
pale flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, gold and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It's an old
story—the oldest we have on our planet—
the story of replacement.

Roxane Gay, NYT Op Ed

Here's the thing about anger. We only seem to prioritize one kind — anger in reaction to progress. And we never seem to acknowledge the anger rising out of oppression, marginalization, and under representation.

Laurie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here"

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, after- ward, presses her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon return'ing make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye's instructions, is neces- sarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That's where the narrator comes in. 

John Armstrong, John Aikin (1804). “The Art of Preserving Health”

Distrust yourself, and sleep before you fight, 

'Tis not too late tomorrow to be brave.